Jonathan Lerner
AUTHOR

Jonathan Lerner

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Jonathan Lerner's memoir PERFORMANCE ANXIETY: THE HEADLONG ADOLESCENCE OF A MID-CENTURY KID is coming soon from Wipf & Stock Publishers.

PERFORMANCE ANXIETY is a vivid portrayal of one rocky childhood—and of America on the brink of the cultural tumult known as "the sixties." With rare honesty and humble self-forgiveness Jonathan Lerner recalls the exuberance and pain of growing up in a time and place, and a family, that seemed whole but were cracking apart.

He is sixteen in 1964. He has friends. He has fun. He smokes unfiltered Luckies. He loses his virginity. He gets his first car, and drives with reckless abandon. He is growing up as fast as he can, if not as fast as he wants.

A white boy from the suburbs, he goes into the Black city to see the Motown Revue, and to listen to jazz in smokey clubs. Inspired by the non-violent civil rights movement, he embarks on an activist path that in a few years will place him in the militant Weather Underground. He has sex with girls, to obscure the unmentionable fact that he is gay. His father is checked out while his mother is dying—another thing that may not be discussed. The boy pretends he doesn't care. He projects himself as a worldly proto-adult. He is a scared kid.

***

Lerner's novel LILY NARCISSUS is about an American expat family in Asia in the Vietnam War era. "LILY NARCISSUS is at once intimate family portrait and panoramic world history that tracks the disastrous consequences of America's involvement in Asia in the second half of the 20th century," says Andrew Palmer, author of THE BACHELOR. "​It's beautiful, wise, lucid, and disarming. ​I was seduced, then devastated."

When Lerner's first novel CAUGHT IN A STILL PLACE was published, Booklist said, “Lerner breaks the mold. Candid, understated, self-effacing, funny, as stripped down as the emptied world." It depicts a dystopian future when a group of people on an obscure Florida island survive a mysterious plague.

Lerner's other books are the novel ALEX UNDERGROUND and the memoir SWORDS IN THE HANDS OF CHILDREN. Both deal with his experiences as a young gay man in the radical movement of the Sixties. He is also an award-winning journalist focusing on architecture and environment, and a contributing editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine. He lives with his husband in New York's Hudson Valley.
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