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Truth Serum: A Memoir
Bernard Cooper recalls his 1960s adolescence in Los Angeles and the emotional rollercoaster of puberty in this painfully honest memoir. He recounts the schoolboy crushes, the family strife, and the ebb and flow of youthful desire, all with a "humor that animates just about every sentence" (New York Times Book Review).
225 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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About the author
Bernard Cooper
28 books32 followersBernard Cooper has won numerous awards and prizes, among them the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize, and literature fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and The National Endowment of the Arts.
He has published two memoirs, Maps to Anywhere and Truth Serum, as well as a novel, A Year of Rhymes, and a collection of short stories, Guess Again.
His work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, Gentleman's Quarterly, and The Paris Review and in several volumes of The Best American Essays.
He lives in Los Angeles and is the art critic for Los Angeles Magazine.
He has published two memoirs, Maps to Anywhere and Truth Serum, as well as a novel, A Year of Rhymes, and a collection of short stories, Guess Again.
His work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, Gentleman's Quarterly, and The Paris Review and in several volumes of The Best American Essays.
He lives in Los Angeles and is the art critic for Los Angeles Magazine.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
November 17, 2023
Truth Serum, by Bernard Cooper, is a stellar memoir. He recounts stories from his boyhood, his differences. One example was his desire for a come-as-you-are party with his male friends, but that didn't happen, his male friends arrived up in their normal clothes. He was imagining having a girls’ pajama party.
His mother wanted a freezer to store meat, eventually she gets her freezer and he goes with her to the butcher. The line behind them is long and his mother keeps on ordering a large supply of meat. We get a picture of his parents, a mother who refuses to learn to drive, giving excuses he knows are not true, she has a birth certificate. Her role is to feed her family. “The freezer’s plentitudes had always reassured my mother that she was prepared for anything.”
His mother starts having dizzy spells and gets a diagnosis of congestive heart disease, she has to give up eating meat and smoking cigarettes. Of his relationship with his mother he writes, “Though my mother had grown remote in an effort to recuperate, I welcomed the widening distance between us. I was frightened by my powerful attraction to men—I cringed inwardly when someone spoke of “homos” and sneered with disgust—and had somehow gotten it into my head that mother-love was the source, or at least a symptom, of such desire. By avoiding my mother as she avoided me, I too might be spared a painful fate. It seems incredible to me now that I could have absorbed, as if through osmosis, that kind of creaky Freudian logic, willing to turn my back on my mother as a way to make myself straight.”
He comes to peace with his gayness and finds a partner, Brian a psychotherapist. It is the time of AIDS, they have lost friends, so they each go for a test. This is a stressful wait.
Meanwhile, after his mother's death, his father remarried a black woman. He keeps it a secret until Bernard sees them together and his father's loving attention toward her. He wonders about what he doesn't know about his father. She leaves his father. His father's health begins to decline. Bernard tells his father the man he has met a small number of times is his lover. His father's reply, "Look," said my father without skipping a beat, "you're lucky to have someone. And he's lucky to have you, too. It's no one's business anyway. What the hell else am I going to say?" There's more, a story his father tells from his boyhood, when he rushed away leaving his father in the top of a tree to see a girl he liked. He expected punishment, but instead his father laughed and said, "You must like her a lot." A generational understanding of love.
This is a beautfully woven together memoir.
His mother wanted a freezer to store meat, eventually she gets her freezer and he goes with her to the butcher. The line behind them is long and his mother keeps on ordering a large supply of meat. We get a picture of his parents, a mother who refuses to learn to drive, giving excuses he knows are not true, she has a birth certificate. Her role is to feed her family. “The freezer’s plentitudes had always reassured my mother that she was prepared for anything.”
His mother starts having dizzy spells and gets a diagnosis of congestive heart disease, she has to give up eating meat and smoking cigarettes. Of his relationship with his mother he writes, “Though my mother had grown remote in an effort to recuperate, I welcomed the widening distance between us. I was frightened by my powerful attraction to men—I cringed inwardly when someone spoke of “homos” and sneered with disgust—and had somehow gotten it into my head that mother-love was the source, or at least a symptom, of such desire. By avoiding my mother as she avoided me, I too might be spared a painful fate. It seems incredible to me now that I could have absorbed, as if through osmosis, that kind of creaky Freudian logic, willing to turn my back on my mother as a way to make myself straight.”
He comes to peace with his gayness and finds a partner, Brian a psychotherapist. It is the time of AIDS, they have lost friends, so they each go for a test. This is a stressful wait.
Meanwhile, after his mother's death, his father remarried a black woman. He keeps it a secret until Bernard sees them together and his father's loving attention toward her. He wonders about what he doesn't know about his father. She leaves his father. His father's health begins to decline. Bernard tells his father the man he has met a small number of times is his lover. His father's reply, "Look," said my father without skipping a beat, "you're lucky to have someone. And he's lucky to have you, too. It's no one's business anyway. What the hell else am I going to say?" There's more, a story his father tells from his boyhood, when he rushed away leaving his father in the top of a tree to see a girl he liked. He expected punishment, but instead his father laughed and said, "You must like her a lot." A generational understanding of love.
This is a beautfully woven together memoir.
August 20, 2009
Read Cooper's Maps to Anywhere first. Then read anything of his you can get your hands on.
May 17, 2022
Loved the story "If and When" and that bumped it from a 3 to a 4. So much crying from me, onto that story.
May 15, 2022
In masterful poetic prose. Bernard Cooper crystallizes moments from his upbringing in 1960s Los Angeles. His cigarette-smoking mother, his occasionally ranting father and the heat of Los Angeles, are told with a beautiful sense of observation and looming tragedy. Boyhood crushes, obsessions –including a certain day-glo shirt– and his abrupt encounter with two drag queens, are told in finely-tuned detail.
While some of the essays are brief and concise, one of the more telling, and I would say important, essays is “If and When,” his story about his relationship in what becomes a serodiscordant couple in the middle of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. While not his poetic or finally sculpted as his earlier-set shorter works, it thoroughly shows the frustrations, fears, cautions and joys of a gay relationship in the 1980s and how two men navigated their changing lives.
While some of the essays are brief and concise, one of the more telling, and I would say important, essays is “If and When,” his story about his relationship in what becomes a serodiscordant couple in the middle of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. While not his poetic or finally sculpted as his earlier-set shorter works, it thoroughly shows the frustrations, fears, cautions and joys of a gay relationship in the 1980s and how two men navigated their changing lives.
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January 20, 2021I really enjoyed Bernard Cooper's writing style. I enjoyed the way he moved between topics and stories in this memoir. Attention to detail, and a true master of his language. The story was very poignant in its telling of the burgeoning AIDS crisis from the 80s to the 90s. I too lived through that era and, all of those experiences—I was familiar with. I do recommend this book.
December 25, 2014
Cooper is a terrific writer who describes his childhood and adulthood in intimate detail as he wrestles with his sexuality. This memoir is often amusing, often sad, but always well-written, open, and honest.
October 12, 2024
I wonder sometimes about the ways in which books, and their authors, align with our selves and experiences. I have a lot in common with Bernard Cooper, a gay man, a boomer, Jewish, grew up in LA, writing, arts. While he's a few years older than me, I relate to his neuroses, his childhood landscape, his covert sexuality, his family dynamics. I appreciate that this is a book of memoirs, plural, and that it is composed of personal essays, most of which really clicked for me. He describes perceptions and observations that I pictured vividly, accurately. Save for the essay on being a part of mixed status HIV couple (which is written in a present tense), the book feels fresh even if it was written thirty years ago. It makes me wonder what Cooper has been writing lately. . . .
July 14, 2019
Cooper is one of those authors I return to again and again, and always find something new. I am in awe of his inventive and poignant observational powers.
October 19, 2013
I loved his stories and anyone who has struggled with difference will identify with this narrator's childhood. I only gave it 3 stars because for me the book reached a logical climax after the scene with Greg at the end of "Almost like language". I was ready for things to begin to wrap up and I think many of the stories that followed belonged in a subsequent book.
It was interesting to watch him work with time - the early chapters are quite chronologic and read like a fairly pure coming-of-age memoir. But then he seems to move to more thematic chapters for the second half of the book. Again, it made me wonder if we didn't have two books here and not one.
It was interesting to watch him work with time - the early chapters are quite chronologic and read like a fairly pure coming-of-age memoir. But then he seems to move to more thematic chapters for the second half of the book. Again, it made me wonder if we didn't have two books here and not one.
July 1, 2008
I read Cooper's The Bill from My Father a few years ago, and really enjoyed it, so I was happy to pick up this older work when I saw it at the library. It's basically a collection of short memoir pieces. Many are about his struggles as a child and teen to bury his sexuality or about his experiences as a gay man in Southern California at the dawn of the AIDS crisis. It was a powerful reminder, at this time of international GLBT pride celebrations, of how pervasive homophobia can be, individually and culturally, and how broadly and deeply AIDS has changed the world.
June 7, 2012
Bernard Cooper grew up knowing that he was different, and he felt embarrassed by it. As a baby boomer in LA, his longlings and yearnings were juxt opposed to other boys of his generation, i.e. he was attacted to them. Filled with emotion and twists and tales, this memoir reads like a series of short stories. Excellent writing.
September 30, 2012
Great series of autobiographical short stories about the author's life growing up in the 1960s as Jewish and somewhat gender non-conforming, coming out as a gay man, and living in the age of HIV/AIDS.
July 20, 2014
Cooper is a beautiful writer. This is a memoir, but even if you don't give a damn about what happened in his life you will revel in the wonder of his prose.
This is actually the first thing by Cooper that I've read but it certainly won't be the last
This is actually the first thing by Cooper that I've read but it certainly won't be the last
May 14, 2011
I will NEVER forget the story about the Day-Glo T-shirt.
December 12, 2011
Anyone who wants to write memoir should look at the way Bernard moves through time in this fantastic work.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews