Writing in the Flesh (Essays on My Lives, My Bodies, My Families, My Places, My Movies)

A confessional of the unrepentant, Writing in the Flesh caresses taboos, confronts sentimentality, and recasts memory. Thomas Waugh writes the body back into the intellectual autobiography, revealing the unsettling arguments and politics born from the tastes and desires of his own carnal vessel.

Shaped by the arc of a life still in full flight – a preacher’s kid who grows up to be a porn teacher and, along the way, a New Left activist and expert in documentary, queer, and Canadian film – Writing in the Flesh confronts the struggle of writing the self. Against the backdrop of Montreal’s Plateau-Mont-Royal, New York City, and the Punjab, Waugh brings places and people to life in profound and unexpected ways. This is also a memoir about history, the archive, and ephemera: Waugh mines his personal annals for photographs, film stills, testimony, and correspondence to reconstitute the voices of blood and chosen families, to hedge against erratic memory, and to give sense to life. Indebted to the tradition of queer first-person rabble rousers, Waugh takes us on a journey through seven decades of queer relations: the erotic, the pedagogical, the familial, the romantic, the platonic, and, of course, the filmic.

Sexy, cinematic, encyclopedic: this vivacious vita celebrates a life filled with family and chosen family, movies, and beefcake. At the same time these pages are, as the title declares, a writing in the flesh: the unveiling of the fraught, vulnerable, declining yet still robust and pleasured body at the very centre of it all.

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