The Kept Woman

I’ve just finished John Rechy’s autobiography About My Life and the Kept Woman, and can thoroughly recommend it. Although, perhaps "autobiography" is too fixed a term. The frontispiece bears the warning: This is not what happened; it is what is remembered. Its sequence is the sequence of recollection. And indeed, the book feels as though the reader is inhabiting the author’s dream; for the most part solid, but now and then turning into myth.

The "kept woman" refers to Marisa Guzman, mistress of Augusto de Leon. A person whom the 12-year old Rechy saw, almost as an apparition, at his sister’s wedding, and whose image and mannerisms he never forgot. Again and again the memory of his meeting her and watching her smoke her cigarette recurs as a leitmotif throughout his subsequent life. The same moment also transfixes and shapes a girl, Alicia Gonzales, whose story unfolds as a counterpoint, told as gossip by Rechy’s beloved sister, to his own. The climax, when the two meet as adults in a San Francisco restaurant, is again dreamlike and ultimately disastrous for one of them.

I loved it.