The story of the education of a wayward wild child and acidhead who, searching for meaning and purpose, found refuge in the demimonde of the ruined but magical metropolis that was New York City in the 1970s.
Advertised as a coming-of-age story, Trebay’s beautiful book is more like a coming-to-terms story about his own fugitive needs ... Trebay is an efficient and pleasingly wide-eyed guide to "the teeming microecology of downtown New York" ... A memoir that, for all its fictive energy, returns a little political realness to the pre-election miasma.
His sentences are long and often languid, rife not with verbiage but the voice of a skilled and patient storyteller. He offers nuanced personal recollections ... By virtue of the fact that Trebay filters everything through his introspective gaze, it’s occasionally difficult to feel present in the scenes he describes; that distance sometimes results in a formality heavier on facts than immediacy ... A generous and deeply felt memoir.
The rambling anecdotes don’t always move the narrative forward, but they coalesce into a rich portrait of the city and its characters. The result is an engrossing story of family dysfunction redeemed by self-reinvention.