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Subject: 'Advocate' article
Broken Fever: Reflections of a Gay Boyhood. (Brief Article)
Author/s: Lawrence Ferber
Issue: April 24, 2001
Writer James Morrison talks about crossing Oscar Wilde with Vladimir Nabokov for Broken Fever, his evocative new memoir of growing up gay
Childhood may be a fresh time, but rarely is it written about in as fresh a manner as James Morrison, an openly gay professor of English at North Carolina State University, has managed to. Morrison's Broken Fever: Reflections of a Gay Boyhood (St. Martin's) exquisitely mixes essay, memoir, fiction, and a slew of Wildean epigrams ("Lack calls forth desire, but it is desire that conjures lack"). And through serpentinely worded, stylized episodes involving crushes, family pets, Pinocchio, and the removal of his tonsils, Morrison dissects a gay identity that always was--even if it wasn't intuited at the time.
"I wanted to try and express the thought process of a kid in the language of an adult," says Morrison, 40, who was published in 1995's Lambda-winning compilation Wrestling With the Angel. "It's going to sound pretentious, but I kept going back to Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, which is his childhood memoir. There's one page about his brother, who was gay, and I thought that was the most moving thing the first time I read it, at 12. To this day I still cry whenever I read that page. I was trying to get something of Nabokov's really obtuse understanding of his gay brother into this book."
Does this mean Morrison aspires to become the gay Nabokov? "I wouldn't want to claim that mantle," he laughs. "Besides, I think it's already been claimed by Edmund White."
Ferber also contributes to Time Out New York and other publications.