Part remembrance, part fiction, this modern, jazzy take on the memoir uses a fugue-like structure to paint a vivid portrait of Jessie Vincent Grandier and the striving black middle class that spawned him. Born to a high-yellow, upper-crust New Orleans Creole mother and a low-born, bayou-bred, military father, Jessie steadfastly battles to reconcile his existence with expectations and preconceptions of those around him -- black and white, gay and straight. He shoulders the weight of his black bourgeois family's hopes through the 60s and 70s, suffering the high price those strivings took in a barely de-segregated America. At eleven years-old, he endures his mother's death, and the resulting familial melodramas that tear him and his family apart. If not broken, then seemingly irreparably bent, he wends his way through Harvard in the 70s and drinks his way through the Reagan 80s in gay bars from the LA barrios to Beverly Hills. When his family's grandiose ambitions have abandoned him, when he's almost beaten, and when it's a breath away from too late, he looks back, and regards the jagged shards of his life--and we watch him as he pieces them into a whole. A ribald, occasionally hilarious, sometimes brutal and utterly unique look at race, sex, and redemption-the hard way

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