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Desire: A Memoir
by Jonathan Dollimore
(Bloomsbury, £19.99)
IN JONATHAN DOLLIMORE'S unflinching memoir, the writer, academic and cultural critic deals openly with issues of sexual identity, lost love and the gay sub-cultures of the 1970s to the 1990s.
It begins with a poignant vignette in which Dollimore, a teenage boy from a working-class background, sees his mother in her car with an adult friend of the family who is trying to have sex with her — a man who'd also been having sex with him, “teaching” him to desire.
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