Acclaimed novelist portrays Black characters outside the comfort zone

Author Leonce Gaiter provides larger-than-life takes on living in America

Leonce Gaiter’s “A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom”

GaiterPARADISE, CA, UNITED STATES, December 5, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ — For readers who like their fiction in the grand, old-school tradition comes a jazzy, genre-bending historical fiction/memoir featuring a fascinating take on the Black anti-hero. With “A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom,” author Leonce Gaiter paints a vivid, wildly entertaining portrait of Jessie Vincent Grandier and the striving African American middle class that shaped him in the 1960s. The book is also a raucous tale of a Black man navigating white worlds through the 1970s and Reagan 80s.

Born to a high-yellow, upper-crust New Orleans Creole mother and a lowborn, Louisiana bayou-bred, military father, Jessie battles to reconcile his existence with expectations and preconceptions of those around him — black and white, gay and straight.

He shoulders the weight of his black bourgeois family’s hopes through the ‘60s and ‘70s, his mother’s death, and the resulting familial melodrama. He wends his way through Harvard in the ‘70s and drinks his way through the Reagan ‘80s in gay bars from the LA barrio to Beverly Hills. When Jessie’s grandiose ambitions have abandoned him – when he’s almost beaten, and when it’s a breath away from too late, he looks back, regards the jagged shards of his life and pieces them into a remarkable whole.

Gaiter has a long history of writing characters who are fascinating to watch, but not necessarily easy to love. “I just give myself the same permission to write anti-heroes as any white writer would,” Gaiter said. He notes that Black anti-heroes like Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s “Native Son” and the Narrator in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” are reacting to the shackles of a racist society. Both are victimized by the world around them and stymied in their attempts to change it.

“It was pointed out to me that my Black characters function from a place of assumed power,” Gaiter said. “They assume they have the right to remake the world in their own image and they display a megalomaniacal drive to do so. Their very being rests on doing so.”

“A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom” has received widespread praise. Publisher’s Weekly’s Booklist named it an “Editor’s Pick,” and hailed its “lyrical narrative” that “defies conventional prose.” Blue Ink Review praised its “wonderfully evocative language, filled with musicality,” and IndieReader called it, “… a bold novel. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal.”

“I write to entertain,” Gaiter concludes, “and I like grand, larger-than-life entertainments that, like my characters, don’t necessarily follow the rules.”

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