3 Review(s)

"‘As everyone knows by now, I’m homosexual.’ To write this sentence and to speak it publicly, which is a great liberation, is why I write. Provocative and percipient, The Man Who Would Be Queen is a collection of lyric essays on the self that flaunts itself as autobiographical fiction. In the words of its writer: ‘The art of living is the art of creating life-fictions.’ The first and second sections of the autobiography take us through the garden of delight or the no man’s land of childhood, and the circle of hell or the coming of age years; it is in the penultimate section ‘How I write/Why I write’ that the poet achieves the desired garden of bliss. Lyrical and erudite, playful and dark, The Man Who Would Be Queen is a significant landmark in Indian writing, both as the autobiography of a homosexual and of a poet. "