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Further Praise for A Stone Boat

A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize

“A groundbreaking exploration of sexual identity and a gripping narrative of loss.”

—Naomi Wolf

“Working in incredibly elegant, nearly poetic prose, Andrew Solomon has cut through the sensitive skin, has ever-so-neatly retracted the flesh and exposed the heart so that one might stand over it and watch it beat, marveling at its simultaneous strength and fragility.”

—A. M. Homes

“Brittle irony and teeming grief, a pairing that achieves an odd but perfect balance . . . The novel buzzes with bizarre charm.”

—The London Sunday Times

“Confronts homosexuality and the politics and pressures of family bonds in an understated yet painfully revealing fashion refreshing in its lack of pretense or literary gimmickry. Solomon’s prose . . . packs a vivid and lyrical punch that’s music to the eyes and mind.”

—Details magazine

“Exquisite fiction . . . An extraordinary anatomy of life in the face of horror, love . . . and death.”

—Isthmus

“Elegant and moving . . . Love and death make dramatic entrances in this elegiac novel.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Beautiful . . . a reach toward Proust, the evocation of significant feeling and memory out of the commonplace.”

—Lambda Book Report

Dedication

For my father and brother

Epigraph

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

drawn from the cold hard mouth

of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown.

Elizabeth Bishop

“At the Fishhouses”

I: My Mother’s Paris

I

MY MOTHER’S PARIS

I need to write this as quickly as possible, because it is about my mother. I want to write it while we can still remember how we hoped that she would get well. That is sentimental and extravagant, I know. I once told my mother that I would never forget her because there is so much of her in me, but this year, I’m not so sure that I can rely on myself to recall everything about her, and I need to remember everything I possibly can. Did I get this sentimental and extravagant streak from her? Five years ago, I would have said that it came from my father, but now I’m not so sure.