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better trivialise it.
    I’m lying on my front, pushing my ass up towards Ben. ‘You will be careful about how you stick it in, won’t you?’ I said teasingly.
    Ooh, what a dirty mind you’ve got! Ben was only giving me my weekly testosterone injection. Sweet. A man needs all the help he can get at my age.
    I suppose you also want to hear about all the old characters who used to hang out at Barbary Lane. My LOGICAL family, rather than my BIOLOGICAL family. Geddit? Well, Brian’s still around and he’s bought a Winnebago. Ben thinks he’s hot, but Brian’s always been dead straight, so no chance there.
    Anyway, ever since Mary Ann left, Brian’s been worried about bringing up their daughter, Shawna. But he shouldn’t be. He’s done a great job. She’s working in a strip club – a mastaburtorium she calls it – and she’s about to move to New York to publish her sex memoirs. She’s worried how her dad will feel about her leaving San Fran, but I told her he’ll get over it. Hmm, maybe that’s not so fascinating.
    Well then, there’s dear old Anna Madrigal. At 85 – having spent half her life as a man and the other half as a woman – she’s still our mummy. But she’s taken to talking enigmatically so she’ll probably die at some point.
    What else? There’s a friend of mine called Jake who’s a transsexual. ‘I haven’t had the addadictomy,’ he purred. ‘I said, I haven’t had the addadictomy’
    ‘I heard you the first time,’ I said.
    ‘Well, it’s my only gag and I didn’t want you to miss it.’
    So we fly to Florida to see Mum, and it’s all kind of bittersweet. She doesn’t like gays that much, but she loves me and Benand gives us power of attorney to stop Irwin and Lenore prolonging her life.
    We also get to hear some great gossip on how Mum twice nearly left Dad, and how Dad once got it on with Lenore. Imagine! I couldn’t, but people are supposed to reveal family secrets on their deathbed and this was all I could come up with.
    Mum is taking her time to die, so we fly back to San Fran to do a bit more gardening and the bathhouses, when my arthritis allows, and then Irwin calls again to say she really is on her way out. But then I hear that Anna is dying so I stay with my LOGICALs and even Mary Ann turns up from New York to say goodbye. And that’s all there is to it, really.
    Digested read, digested: Michael lives and Tales of the City die.
Bright Shiny Morning

by James Frey (2008)
    Two teens. Two teens stuck in an eastern town. Two teens stuck in sentences of arbitrary punctuation and repetition arbitrary punctuation and repetition that is meant to suggest something hip, something beat but just feels a bit tired and mannered. ‘I can feel the glow of the west,’ Dylan says. ‘I’m gonna jack me a car, drive us west to California.’ They reach the ocean they carry on driving. The car starts sinking. ‘I think we’ve gone too far,’ says Maddie. They swim back to shore and this is where they stay. Los Angeles.
    Her parents call her Esperanza they can’t speak English but they live in LA and they got hope. She’s pretty but she’s ashamed of her thighs she flunks school because of her thighs she takes ajob cleaning for Mrs Campbell she pretends not to speak English as it’s the only way she can get a job with her thighs.
    There are lots of facts about Los Angeles in Wikipedia, facts that if you jot them down one at a time might somehow seem quite deep. All the Los Angeles banks were robbed at least once in 1895. See what I mean?
    Old Man Joe’s hair turned white when he was 29 he aged 40 years in one night. He’s now 274, drinks chablis out of toilet cisterns on Venice Beach that’s about as interesting as he gets. You’re gonna age 40 years reading about him.
    Amberton Parker. Amberton Parker the most unconvincing Hollywood film star you’ll ever meet. He kisses his wife Casey in bed with her lesbian lover leaves the kids with the nanny leaves the house. He meets