REVIEW

In four essays, Keegan Lawler’s My Own Private Idaho brilliantly stitches a seamless, wholehearted bildungsroman about his experience as a bisexual kid growing up amid overt homophobia.

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The first essay, “Country Queer,” begins with a quiet truth. In rural, woodsy places, it’s not the big animals that are likely to get you (bears and such). It’s the ticks. They’re everywhere. Hard to spot. Harder to remove. And they can seriously mess you up. So too the cruelties of childhood, Lawler suggests, whose ticks bury “too deep in the skin to get out.” In the remaining essays, Lawler invites the reader to consider the details of his childhood—and its burrowing ticks—to ponder with him how, as an adult, he might ferret their bodies out, or at least, learn to live with the scars.

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The bulk of the collection is taken by the middle two essays, the titular “My Own Private Idaho” and “Brokeback Mountain,” in which we learn about the other (four) gay kids Lawler knew growing up. How each of them survived the cruelties hurled at them by an insecure heterosexual world. How Lawler internalized all of it. How this kept him from coming out in his teen years but also from forming community when he needed it most. Lawler’s prose is stark and even-handed. His tone, that of a friend talking to a trusted friend. The reader cannot help but feel abuses alongside young Lawler and agonize with him over choices made along the way.

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Yet, the heart of this collection is, perhaps, Lawler’s earnest self-awareness. He’s keenly aware of Western tropes, queer tropes, coming-of-age tropes, but doesn’t try to pretend his story is immune from such forces. His genius as a writer and thinker is how he holds space for cognitive dissonance—that, yes, tropes are cliches, but also, yes, they can still hold real resonance and relevance. Ultimately, this collection is an exploration of dissonance—cognitive, ironic, or otherwise. Lawler both belongs and does not belong to Idaho, and it to him. The same for his chosen adult home in the Pacific Northwest. Even the essay titles suggest Lawler’s hunger for juxtaposition. Each references a different cultural touchstone—a film, a song, a magazine—that holds wider cultural significance, and yet, is deeply personal to Lawler’s experience, as if to suggest that part of ingesting art is understanding its popular meaning while also creating a private one. The result of this attention is breathtaking. A tightly-constructed, excellently-plotted set of essays in which Lawler considers tick after deeply embedded tick and writes himself into his own private Idaho—by publicly reflecting on his lack of one.

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Book Details

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My Own Private Idaho can be purchased here.

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Published by Red Bird Chapbooks. The volume is 5.5”x 8.5” and is comprised of 39 pages including acknowledgements. The book is hand-made. The binding, hand-sewn. The edition, hand-numbered. The paper is deliciously smooth and hefts a pleasing weight.​​

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