The Cool Side of the Pillow is a coming-of-age story that begins with my life among the aristocracy in Mexico, and concludes in a courtroom in El Paso, Texas. Arrested in Mexico City and after three months in prison, I am on the edge of my seat waiting to hear a judge decide my future. Mine was a life of privilege --My British father, a pilot during the First World War, and my beautiful mother are ill-matched, but they have forged a life together in a privileged society. I have no memory of the death of my first-born brother, but I recall vividly the day my younger brother Christopher, who was one year younger and my best friend, died at the age of four. Two weeks later, blaming incompetent doctors, our parents packed up my sister “Billie,” who was six years older, and me, and headed to Los Angeles. My sister figures out her life quite quickly, while I, on the other hand, become, in the words of one teacher, “incorrigible.” In my mind, I am the lonely, bright boy who struggles to form an identity as my parents divorce, and I am moved from a safe and responsible farm life and a one-room schoolhouse, to one of the biggest high schools in Los Angeles. I develop a persona that enables me to manage in a tricky world. Soon I am introduced to the darker realms of society, where I try to create a balance between a normal life of dating and fun hijinks and the almost uncontrollable urges to outwit the system. As one who had learned to cover his fears and anger with a patina of arrogance and callousness, I had to be brought to the absolute edge of terror before I would begin my adult life with an attitude of gratitude and responsibility.

The Cool Side of the Pillow is a coming-of-age story that begins with my life among the aristocracy in Mexico, and concludes in a courtroom in El Paso, Texas. Arrested in Mexico City and after three months in prison, I am on the edge of my seat waiting to hear a judge decide my future. Mine was a life of privilege --My British father, a pilot during the First World War, and my beautiful mother are ill-matched, but they have forged a life together in a privileged society. I have no memory of the death of my first-born brother, but I recall vividly the day my younger brother Christopher, who was one year younger and my best friend, died at the age of four. Two weeks later, blaming incompetent doctors, our parents packed up my sister "Billie," who was six years older, and me, and headed to Los Angeles. My sister figures out her life quite quickly, while I, on the other hand, become, in the words of one teacher, "incorrigible." In my mind, I am the lonely, bright boy who struggles to form an identity as my parents divorce, and I am moved from a safe and responsible farm life and a one-room schoolhouse, to one of the biggest high schools in Los Angeles. I develop a persona that enables me to manage in a tricky world. Soon I am introduced to the darker realms of society, where I try to create a balance between a normal life of dating and fun hijinks and the almost uncontrollable urges to outwit the system. As one who had learned to cover his fears and anger with a patina of arrogance and callousness, I had to be brought to the absolute edge of terror before I would begin my adult life with an attitude of gratitude and responsibility.

The mid-40s are that time in a gay man's life when his major paradigm shifts from sexy to Sansabelts. But when Barry Grooms's partner of twenty years is killed on Barry's forty-fifth birthday, his world doesn't so much evolve as it does explode. After navigating through the surreal conveyor belt of friends and family, he can't eat another casserole or swallow much more advice on what constitutes grief. Still numb, he leaves his homestore and design business in the care of others as he escapes to Key West, then New York. There he gets a thankless new job working for a crazy lady in a poncho, then has too many drinks with a narcissistic Broadway actor. Next it's a nude exercise class that redefines flop sweat, and from there he's on to a relationship with a man twenty years his junior. Yet no matter how great the retreat from the man he used to be, life's gravity spins Barry back to the small town where he grew up for one more ironic twist that teaches him how to say goodbye with grace.

The lives of three very different women--Lissy Snyder, a beautiful, insecure newlywed and unwilling stepmother; her resentful, nosey housecleaner, Michelle; and Angela Graves, the bookish, solitary head of a local book group--intersect over the course of a summer in the Hamptons as they find their reading choices changing their lives forever. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

At the period when the episode just related occurred in the life of Mr. Zachary Thorpe the younger—that is to say, in the year 1837—Baregrove Square was the farthest square from the city, and the nearest to the country, of any then existing in the north-western suburb of London. But, by the time fourteen years more had elapsed—that is to say, in the year 1851—Baregrove Square had lost its distinctive character altogether; other squares had filched from it those last remnants of healthy rustic flavor from which its good name had been derived; other streets, crescents, rows, and villa-residences had forced themselves pitilessly between the old suburb and the country, and had suspended for ever the once neighborly relations between the pavement of Baregrove Square and the pathways of the pleasant fields. Alexander's armies were great makers of conquests; and Napoleon's armies were great makers of conquests; but the modern Guerilla regiments of the hod, the trowel, and the brick-kiln, are the greatest conquerors of all; for they hold the longest the soil that they have once possessed. How mighty the devastation which follows in the wake of these tremendous aggressors, as they march through the kingdom of nature, triumphantly bricklaying beauty wherever they go! What dismantled castle, with the enemy's flag flying over its crumbling walls, ever looked so utterly forlorn as a poor field-fortress of nature, imprisoned on all sides by the walled camp of the enemy, and degraded by a hostile banner of pole and board, with the conqueror's device inscribed on it—"THIS GROUND TO BE LET ON BUILDING LEASES?" What is the historical spectacle of Marius sitting among the ruins of Carthage, but a trumpery theatrical set-scene, compared with the mournful modern sight of the last tree left standing, on the last few feet of grass left growing, amid the greenly-festering stucco of a ...