Lot Six

April 6, 2020
A gay playwright struggles with his claustrophobic Jewish community as he attempts to define himself in this raucous if flawed memoir. Adjami recalls his upbringing among Syrian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, whom he paints as a close-knit tribe focused on religion and business and hostile to homosexuality. As a dreamy, uncertain youth, he wrangles with domineering figures including his volatile, narcissistic parents and a contemptuous Juilliard playwriting professor while groping for an identity by trying on new personas like outfits, including faux-French–accented fashionista, black-clad Nietzschean—“I had to become the Superman”—and, finally, a gay man comfortable in his own skin despite his clan’s unease with him. If not fictionalized, Adjami’s memoir is certainly theatricalized: he alters timelines, invents dialogue, and inserts composite characters, and thus delivers pitch-perfect Brooklynese dialogue, colorful personalities, and entertaining scenes (“By the time we were done eating, Howie had convinced himself that the only part-time job he could ever get was spraying perfume samples at Bloomingdale’s dressed as a woman”). Unfortunately, his take on his adventures often feels melodramatic (“Like the desert-trawling Jews in the Bible, my exile was transmuted into freedom,” he declaims of his transfer to a new high school) and calculated for literary effect. The result feels more like a script than real life.

April 15, 2020
Determined to be an artist, a Syrian Jew wrests himself from his past. Growing up in a Syrian Sephardic Jewish community in Brooklyn, award-winning playwright Adjmi felt like an outsider to his culture, religion, and family. In his debut memoir, the author chronicles in visceral detail his anguished youth and laborious search for his true identity. His father, he writes, was a con man and pathological liar who never understood any of his children. "He was constantly situating his kids in stories about our lives that had nothing to do with us," writes the author, "but somehow we ended up as characters in those stories." Still, Adjmi wanted to please him, hoping that he could win his father's love, "even if his love confused my sense of self." His father left the family, cutting off contact for five years, leaving the children with their demanding, narcissistic, angry mother. Childhood, he thought, was "a sort of exhausting performance." When he was 10, he "plummeted into depression," which his mother considered a personal affront. He desperately wanted her love but "learned to tamp these impulses. When I did hug her," he writes, "I sensed her flinching discomfort." Besides depression and anxiety, Adjmi was beset by "anguish about being a homosexual." In his sophomore year of high school, he was in "a near-suicidal depression," and he feared becoming a "Lot Six." Lot numbers, he explains, were part of a coded system that Syrian businessmen used to negotiate prices on cameras and Walkmans. "Lot Six was code for three, an odd number--odd, as in queer." Lot Six "had no value," rendering him worthless. Adjmi struggled mightily to reinvent himself, prove himself "morally superior" to his family and culture, fulfill his artistic ambitions, and, finally, believe in his own talent. Although at times the narrative reads like a long, petulant lament, the author powerfully recounts pain and self-discovery. Raw revelations make for an engrossing memoir.

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June 1, 2020
Every page of Adjmi's memoir, his life story thus far, is stamped with the gifts of the award-winning playwright he would become. From facial expressions to floorboards, he builds scenes that stop and expand time and conjures people, himself included, in uncanny, contradictory completeness. The book begins with Adjmi's mind-bending experience, at age eight, of seeing the murderous musical Sweeney Todd in the early 1980s. Trips from their home in Brooklyn to Manhattan for plays and museums were his and his mom's thing, until they weren't. As he moves through yeshiva, college, and playwriting programs, he will meet works of art and philosophy that will similarly reach, undo, and rearrange him. Adjmi's artist's journey, a constant exercise in selfhood and reinvention, is set against the backdrop of his Syrian Jewish family and their community, sources of both pain and inspiration (the book's title comes from an epithet for gay). So suffused with Adjmi's skill for drama and spectacular vocabulary is this gimlet-eyed personal history of making and being made by art, it is emotionally vast and utterly triumphant.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

September 25, 2020

In an author's note in this first memoir, Guggenheim fellow and Whiting Award-- winning dramatist Adjmi admits that for this account he has changed the names of family and friends because memoirs, unlike biographies, do not need to reflect the lives written about exactly. Rather, these accounts should convey the essence of the memoirist's experience, feelings, and thoughts while tracing significant life events. Adjmi, who grew up in a Syrian Jewish family in Brooklyn, began his search for belonging at a young age. Moving away from the cultural traditions of his family, he gravitated toward an eclectic world of art, books, plays, and musicals. He studied the works of the great philosophers as well as fashion magazines and foreign films, all of which would contribute to shaping the artist he would become. His vivid prose heightens a narrative that explores his search for meaning and the often challenging road to his success as an artist in America. VERDICT Highly recommended; this revealing memoir takes us beyond the facts of Adjmi's life to probe his quest for identity and his rise as a prominent playwright and author.--Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology, Brooklyn

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2020

An award-winning playwright (e.g., the Whiting Award, the inaugural Steinberg Playwright Award) whose works have been produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Lincoln Center, Adjmi takes a break from the boards to chronicle growing up as a gay Syrian Jew in 1970s-80s Brooklyn. Along the way, he touches on cultural influences from Sweeney Todd to street art to the downtown club scene, plus major cultural figures of the time. With a 35,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.