PositiveThe NationWith easy, languid prose, Westmoreland details a coming-of-age story so delicate and diffuse that it barely feels like a narrative at first. It’s only after you’ve gazed into its mists for some time that its larger forms start to appear ... Though Tramps Like Us is direct and unvarnished...its warmth and gentleness distinguish it from many of its contemporaries ... Blunt sentences slip by with the pleasure of smooth pebbles through a loose hand. The prose is so conversational that it’s sometimes startling ... It remains an electric glimpse into an era marked by stigma and willful misunderstanding ... The novel’s greatest achievement is its ability to look into a time when illness and institutional abandonment foreclosed living possibility—and to enliven it from the inside.
Lou Sullivan, Ed. by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma
RaveThe Nation... dispenses with the ubiquitous narrative of transition as a dreary but necessary inconvenience ... because Martin and Ozma begin this collection with Sullivan’s childhood diaries, We Both Laughed takes a wide view of the many subtle influences that shape the burgeoning self ... [Lou\'s] diaries illustrate beautifully that to transition is not to cut oneself off from the world but to emerge more fully into it—to embrace the beauty and complexity of the self so as to better meet the beauty and complexity of others ... poring over his diaries does not feel like an invasion of his privacy, even though he is not here to see new readers encountering his words for the first time. It is more like bearing witness to what he always intended to share with others: his discovery and creation of himself ... It feels like a gift to be able to read such a complete and evocative record of a life spent in pursuit of joy. Now that so many voices speak loudly of transition as a kind of death, what a relief it is to have such a rich historical document of transition as a way of coming alive.
