As a day student on scholarship at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and at Yale University, Monette subjugated his body's urges to his mind's queries, excelling as a student but growing little as a man. Self-pity becomes your oxygen" ( Becoming a Man, p. Born into a lower-middle-class family in Lawrence, Massachusetts, at the end of World War II, Monette saw himself as the quintessentially repressed child of the 1950s and 1960s: "Until I was twenty-five, I was the only man I knew who had no story at all….That's how the closet feels, once you've madeyour nest in it and learned to call it home. He was the product of the repressive Puritan culture of New England. His early life-until his mid-twenties-was a suffocating time, full of torment and hiding. Monette divided his life into two parts, as his National Book Award–winning memoir Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (1992) indicates. Carroll (1978), before AIDS became the primary reality of his life and work in the mid-1980s. He had produced a number of books, in particular the promising first novel Taking Care of Mrs. Though he will be remembered as a central voice of the AIDS crisis, AIDS did not make his career. Paul Monette is a complex figure who combined love and anger, talent and ambition, insecurity and arrogance to forge a rich life and a significant body of work.
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