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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
DRINK YOUR JUICE, SHELBY a review by Gary Richards Tim Anderson. Sweet Tooth: A Memoir. Seattle: Lake Union Publishing, 2014.
GARY RICHARDS, author of Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961 (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), is Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication at the University of Mary Washington. In addition to other reviews for NCLR, see his article on Allan Gurganus’s Plays Well with Others in NCLR 2008 and his interview with and article on Jim Grimsley in NCLR 2009. TIM ANDERSON is the author of Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries (Wayward Mammal, 2010; Lake Union, 2011) and two young adult historical novels published under the name T. Neill Anderson. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he is an editor in Brooklyn, NY, where he lives with his husband.
ABOVE RIGHT Tim Anderson’s 1989 11th grade photograph, from Sanderson High School in Raleigh
Few narratives follow so rigidly set a script as coming out stories, the accounts – whether fictionalized in novels and short stories or recorded in memoirs – of persons who struggle to accept sexual desires or gendered identities that deviate from social norms. In these stories, closely akin to the Bildungsroman, or the coming of age novel, a young person, most often a teenager, acknowledges his or her difference, struggles with acting upon the transgressive desires, and anxiously negotiates guilt, fear, and rejection before reaching some degree of acceptance at the personal, familial, or social level. Writers have, of course, personalized and varied these accounts, shifting the ages, races, and regional identities of the central figures, but the results have not always been successful. Kevin Sessum’s Mississippi Sissy (2008), for instance, specifically focused on a Southern man’s experiences with coming out in the 1970s, but the book’s self-importance grated on some readers. At first glance, Tim Anderson’s Sweet Tooth seems of a piece with Mississippi Sissy, since his memoir chronicles his coming out as gay during his high school and college years in central North Carolina in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, within the first paragraph, Anderson smartly breaks the mold of the coming out narrative, immediately shifting the focus from sexual desire to quite a different sort: “To a boy whose ideal snack was Little Debbie Zebra Cakes, the existence of a disease like diabetes seemed like the dark work of a mean God” (1). As this paragraph and his title emphasize, Sweet Tooth is primarily Anderson’s struggle with type 1 diabetes and its ongoing impact on his life. This is not to say that his sexuality is not important within the book, but, by braiding together reflections of
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his teenage health and sexuality, Anderson reminds us that sexuality is rarely the only or even the most important type of difference confronting a gay or lesbian person. Anderson productively structures the memoir to reinforce this emphasis on his diabetes. Told with wry detachment, candid selfassessment, and prolific sarcasm that often leads to laugh-out-loud moments, the ten central chapters are first-person accounts that move chronologically from his dramatic diagnosis in a Baltimore hospital while on an ill-fated trip with “Jesus-loving high school students” (26), through his comic attempts to date girls, to his college years at Guilford College, UNC Chapel Hill, and the University of Manchester. After each chapter, Anderson offers a brief third-person italicized account, each titled “He’s Lost Control,” that records a critical moment when his blood sugar dipped and control of his body slipped away from him. Although each instance is different, the repetition suggests just how fragile the progress of accepting and successfully handling this disease is. Indeed, even though each episode subtly tracks Anderson’s growing ability to understand and respond at these moments, and the final chapter integrates an italicized moment of crisis midway rather than appends it, Anderson nevertheless concludes the memoir with an italicized “Epilogue: Still Ill.” His point is thus beautifully made with tempered optimism that readers can appreciate: he has largely mastered control of his body, but the disease remains an ever-present consideration. One of Anderson’s most delightful chapters, however, has little to do with either his disease or his sexuality. Rather, Chapter 6, “Meet Me at the Coterie, Where We Will Enjoy Avocados, the Village