The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
When my memoir went out of print, it was as if someone had thrown a stray puppy onto my doorstep. Dazed, mangy, with a tendency to pee on the rug, this orphaned book was something I couldn’t shoo away, or worse, put down, but also something I didn’t have any room for in my life.
In 2007, I was put on Homeland Security’s Watch List. True, my brother had just been arrested. He had been a member of the underground Animal Liberation Front, freeing wild mustangs, mink, and lab animals for nigh on twenty years. But the Watch List?
Sophia Raday’s new book, Love In Condition Yellow–A Memoir of an Unlikely Marriage, is a beautifully rendered, often hilarious, account of how opposites can attract, and maybe even should. It’s also insightful meditation on America after 9/11 as it struggles with its Red State/Blue State animosities.