I’ve Been Very Bad

By John Glassie (The New York Times Magazine, October 1997)

It's no secret that the confessional writing trend -- sparked by memoirs like ''The Kiss,'' Kathryn Harrison's story of her sexual affair with her father -- is giving many writers the opportunity to bring the skeletons out from their closets.

Now, with the publication of ''Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage and Desire'' from Grove Press, the literary form has soared to new heights -- or, depending on your point of view, plunged to new depths. Among the anthology's eight nonfiction tales are accounts of whipping, homeless crack addiction and incest between a brother and sister.

''We are in a moment in the cultural conversation when there has been a kind of disinhibiting about what we are permitted to say publicly,'' says Laurie Stone, the book's editor, whose own contribution, ''Hump,'' recalls the way she ''confused sadomasochistic sex with love-ability and acceptability.''

The most startling piece is by a 17-year-old boy writing under the pseudonym Terminator. Raised by a mother who abused him for not being a girl, Terminator writes about his hell amid the trailer parks of Southern California. In his memoir, ''Baby Doll,'' he dresses in drag and, as a preadolescent, seduces his abusive mother's boyfriend: ''He covers my face in hard, hungry kisses, coating me in the film of his beer-fogged mouth.''

How to evaluate his work? ''It's some of the most powerful writing I have ever read,'' says Karen Rinaldi, an editor at Crown Publishers, which will release an all-Terminator book in 1999. ''It has a beauty that seems divinely inspired.''

Terminator himself was not available to comment. ''He's too young,'' says Stone, ''for interaction with the media.''