Despite its publication date, the beach read label does not define John Glynn’s debut. Out East: Memoir of a Montauk Summer refashions the epic summer tale, dosed with lyrical brawn, grace, and ingenuity ... chronicles one man’s coming out. Equally important, this memoir surveys one man’s maturation ... beautiful, radical honesty ... personifies summer magic ... Summer or not, sharing a cool pop with John Glynn’s remarkable Out East will nudge you to believe in believing once again.
Sun-soaked and brimming with youth, Glynn’s debut memoir chronicles a life-changing summer spent in a Montauk share house. With honesty, heart, and generosity, the memoir explores friendship, first love, and identity.
Glynn, an editor at HarperCollins, writes the Montauk scene with brisk, detached tenderness, but it’s at its most personal that his memoir shines brightest, grasping at the many ways there are to love and be and ultimately revelling in them.
Like a true innocent, Glynn tells us about every friend (all 31 of them) because every friend is important, or will be important, or will happen to be there for each small event on the road to heartbreak and pained discovery ... at times, there is a triviality and a repetitiveness to the narrative of what Mike, Evan and Shane and Ashley drank and wore and said and danced to. But, here’s the thing: John Glynn can write. He can write the heck out of a page ... And so, as coming-out and coming-of-age stories go, this one is subtle, and that restraint may be its virtue ... Read Out East to remember what it was like: the sad, tragic, emotionally turbulent truth of first love. And then stay for the prose. For the beautiful, beautiful prose.
... earnest and hopeful ... In a lesser writer’s hands, these moments of vulnerability might read as self-indulgent, diffuse, but Glynn grounds them firmly within the scope of his own experience. The scenes between him and Matt are rendered with such open-heartedness, such tenderness, too, that we are not only exalted by their chemistry but, at the same time, worried for Glynn, for first love as ephemeral and as delicate as this rarely, if ever, ends happily ... a sheer pleasure to read — and one of the greatest pleasures comes from Glynn’s ability to become our guide to the Hive, introducing us to a colorful cast of millennials ... A masterful storyteller, Glynn skillfully evokes this place and this summer on the page ... arts of Glynn’s memoir are written with the same clarity and ebullience as E.B. White’s Once More to the Lake, if said essay were also infused with equal parts vodka, millennial angst, and sexual longing.
What endures about this portrait is how deeply human it is to be uncertain, to be driving a hundred miles an hour toward nowhere and longing to have a buddy in the car ... While reading this book, you are ultimately grateful that they have each other and are reminded of the precariousness of the emotional inner life that undulates just beneath the surface, even for people who look as though they have it all.
In this sun-dazed debut memoir about loss, identity, and partying with the preppy set, book editor Glynn turns the magnifying glass on his inner turmoil but never manages to inspire much sympathy for his plight ... As a microcosmic rendition of a lost summer’s drunken rhythms and Glynn’s slowly unfolding realization about his own sexuality, the writing resonates with a shimmery tingle ... Glynn’s point of view, however, remains so swaddled in privilege that his emotional distress registers as mere entitlement ... Ultimately this is a neatly observed but light story about coming out.
