Just As I Am: A Novel (Invisible Life Trilogy, Band 2) - Softcover

Buch 2 von 3: Invisible Life Trilogy

Harris, E. Lynn

 
9780385469708: Just As I Am: A Novel (Invisible Life Trilogy, Band 2)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385469705 ISBN 13: 9780385469708
Verlag: Anchor, 1995

Inhaltsangabe

E. Lynn Harris's blend of rich, romantic  storytelling and controversial contemporary issues like  race and bisexuality have found an enthusiastic and  diverse audience across America. Readers celebrate  the arrival in paperback of his second novel,  Just As I Am, which picks up where  Invisible Life left off,  introducing Harris's appealing and authentic characters to a  new set of joys, conflicts, and choices. Raymond,  a young black lawyer from the South, struggles to  come to terms with his sexuality and with the grim  reality of AIDS. Nicole, an aspiring  singer/actress, experiences frustration in both her career and  in her attempts to find a genuine love  relationship. Both characters share an eclectic group of  friends who challenge them, and the reader, to look at  themselves and the world around thern through  different eyes. By portraying Nicole's and Raymond's  joys, as well as their pain, Harris never ceases to  remind us that life, like love, is about  self-acceptance. In this vivid portrait of contemporary  black life, with all its pressures and the  complications of bisexuality, AIDS, and racism, Harris  confirms a faith in the power of love -- love of all  kinds -- to thrill and to heal, which will warm the  hearts of readers everywhere.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

E. Lynn Harris is a former computer sales executive with IBM and a graduate of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He self-published Invisible Life, with great success. It went on to become a Blackboard bestseller and a 1996 ABA Blackboard List Outstanding African American Novel Nominee. In 1996, Just As I Am was awarded the Novel of the Year Prize by Blackboard African-American Bestsellers, Inc. If This World Were Mine was a finalist for the 1997 NAACP Image Award and winner of the James Baldwin Award for Literary Excellence. His new novel, Not A Day Goes By, will be published by Doubleday in summer 2000. Harris currently divides his time between Chicago and New York.

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E. Lynn Harris's blend of rich, romantic storytelling and controversial contemporary issues like race and bisexuality have found an enthusiastic and diverse audience across America. Readers celebrate the arrival in paperback of his second novel, "Just As I Am, which picks up where "Invisible Life left off, introducing Harris's appealing and authentic characters to a new set of joys, conflicts, and choices. Raymond, a young black lawyer from the South, struggles to come to terms with his sexuality and with the grim reality of AIDS. Nicole, an aspiring singer/actress, experiences frustration in both her career and in her attempts to find a genuine love relationship. Both characters share an eclectic group of friends who challenge them, and the reader, to look at themselves and the world around thern through different eyes. By portraying Nicole's and Raymond's joys, as well as their pain, Harris never ceases to remind us that life, like love, is about self-acceptance. In this vivid portrait of contemporary black life, with all its pressures and the complications of bisexuality, AIDS, and racism, Harris confirms a faith in the power of love -- love of all kinds -- to thrill and to heal, which will warm the hearts of readers everywhere.

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Raymond Jr.

I imagine the world was created beneath a canopy of silence. Perfect silence. While in my own personal silence I would create the world I dreamed of. A world full of love and absent of life's harsh realities. A world where all dreams would come true. A place called Perfect. But I've come to realize that some dreams you have to give up. I live in a world that promises to protect me but will not catch me when I fall. In this life I have fallen many times. From these falls I have learned many lessons. Lessons involving lust, loss, love, and life. Lessons that hit as hard as an unannounced summer thunderstorm, sudden and sometimes destructive.

One of my life's unexpected lessons occurred during my senior year in college. It was on the first Friday in October that my brain released a secret it had struggled to protect throughout my adolescence. I learned on that day that my sexual orientation was not a belief or choice, but a fact of my birth. And just like the color of my skin and eyes, these things could not be changed, at least not permanently.

My name is Raymond Winston Tyler, Jr., and I am a thirty-two-soon-to-be-thirty-three-year-old, second-generation attorney. The son of attorney Raymond Winston Tyler and Marlee Allen Tyler, an elementary school teacher, and big brother to fourteen-year-old Kirby. I had a happy childhood, growing up deeply ensconced in the black middle class. A child of the integrated New South, born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, a city that in the past was known more for church bombing than being the bedrock of college football.

I returned home after law school and several years of successful practice in a large New York firm. About a year ago I moved two hours south to Atlanta, after a two-year stint of running my pops's law firm while he followed his lifelong dream and became a member of the Alabama State Senate.

Atlanta struck me as a vibrant city. A cross between country and cosmopolitan, a city where popular eateries still took personal checks, that is with a valid driver's license. A city consumed with sports and the dream of becoming the Motown of the nineties. Atlanta was a city on the move and even though it didn't have the flash and energy of New York City, it was more conducive to my life than Birmingham. Now don't get me wrong, I love my family and my birthplace, but I knew it was time to move on and continue my search for Perfect.

I was living in a trendy Buckhead condo and working for Battle, Carroll & Myers, a black, female-owned law firm specializing in entertamment and sports law. I had originally moved to Atlanta with the understanding that I would go to work for the city government, but a few days before I was to start, I received word that a hiring freeze had been put into effect. I later found out from a friend of my father that the reason for the freeze was because someone in the mayor's offfice wanted the position promised to me to go to an openly gay, black attorney. Now wasn't that just the shit. My Columbia Law School education and major New York firm experience didn't amount to anything. Just my sexual orientation and then only if I was willing to make it public, which I wasn't. So with the help of my good friend Jared Stovall, I went to work for Battle, Carroll & Myers. My position created an ironic dilemma. I was hired in part because of my love and knowledge of college sports. The firm was actively seeking college athletes about to turn professional and it was my job to convince these young men, mostly black and from black colleges, that the firm would be looking out for their best interests. I had just entered a period in my life when I was practicing celibacy and trying very hard to put the male body out of my mind, but now I was constantly in steamy locker rooms with some of the most beautiful bodies in the world.

Our firm also represented a number of rappers and singers, but Gilliam Battle, the founder and only remaining partner, handled the majority of them along with the recording executives. Though an extremely smart woman, Gilliam didn't know jack about sports, other than the fact that pro athletes made a great deal of money and didn't have the slightest idea of what to do with it. Gilliam not only assembled a top team of attorneys but also a staff of investment counselors, speech coaches, doctors, and whatever it took to make sure our clients represented us as well as we represented them.

My social life in Atlanta was in a lot of respects similar to life in Birmingham, back in the closet. Atlanta did have a visible gay community but it was visibly white. I wasn't forced into the closet, it was just a choice I'd made out of respect for my family, especially my pops. My parents knew about and tried to accept my sexuality, but the fact that they knew didn't mean they wanted to discuss it around the dinner table or with my little brother. So like my parents, I too decided to ignore my sexuality and went back to my old straight act the minute I left New York. Talk about your safe sex. Besides, men were basically dogs--couldn't tell the truth if their life depended on it. And now your life does depend on it. Trust me I know. In my past I too have been guilty of not being totally truthful, either with men or women. But men never expect honesty. Women, on the other hand, say that they want the truth; but then they act like they don't hear you when you try to tell it like it is. Sometimes in the heat of passion men are not the only ones who let their sex do the thinking.

Currently there is not a female in my life besides my mother and Gilliam, but there was a man, a good man. I'd met Jared Taylor Stovall in Birmingham when he'd come to run my pops's political campaign. Jared was a political consultant who had been highly recommended when Pops's victory was in doubt. Jared became a member of our family, practically moving into my parents' home during the race. Jared actually convinced me to move to Atlanta by offering me a place to stay and remarking with a devilish smile, "I want my niggah around me all the time."

Jared was quite handsome in a rugged sort of way. His looks inspired confidence--tall and strapping, six foot three and two hundred and ten pounds of slightly bowlegged, biscuit-brown masculinity. Large bittersweet brown eyes, and a smile that would have lit up the Atlanta skyline. He was as smart as he was good-looking, finishing at the top of his class at Morris Brown College and later getting an MBA at Clark-Atlanta University. He was the oldest child and the only son of a devoted mother who had raised him and his two sisters alone in southwest Atlanta. Jared never mentioned his father.

I hadn't shared my sexuality with Jared mainly because it had never come up. I hadn't determined if Jared himself was gay or straight, just as I couldn't tell if his closely cropped hair was naturally curly or mildly relaxed. Only when I felt lonely did Jared's sexuality cross my mind. Sleeping alone with just my pillows for comfort created an insatiable void in my life. Our relationship wavered between brotherly love and romantic love, though it was a romance without sex. A romance in my mind only, at least as far as I knew.

I'm what you would call a romantic, a severe romantic, yet lasting romance has eluded me. I grew up believing that you really fell in love only once and that that love would last forever, like in the movies. I now know that most people consider themselves lucky if they fall in love once and have that love returned. But I wasn't even that lucky; the truth of my present situation was a love life that consisted only of daydreams about Jared and listening to R&B songs about love dreamed but never attained. I longed for a love that would make me feel like the soothing love songs that caused an involuntary smile to linger not only on my face but in my...

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Verlag
Anchor
Erscheinungsdatum
1995
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385469705
ISBN 13 
9780385469708
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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ISBN 10:  0385469691 ISBN 13:  9780385469692
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