The Tooth Fairy is an extraordinarily honest, shockingly funny memoir of a man torn between isolation and connection. In shimmering prose that weaves between intimate confessions, deadpan asides, and trenchant reflections on the fear and turmoil that defined the long decade after 9/11, Clifford Chase tells the stories that have shaped his adulthood. There are his aging parents, whose disagreements sharpen as their illnesses looms larger; and his beloved brother, lost tragically to AIDS; and his long-term boyfriend-always present, but always kept at a distance. There is also the revelatory, joyful music of the B-52s, Chase’s sexual confusion in his twenties, and more recently, the mysterious appearance in his luggage of weird objects from Iran the year his mother died. In the midst of all this is Chase’s singular voice-incisive, wry, confiding, by turns cool and emotional, always engaging. The way this book is written-in pitch-perfect fragments-is crucial to Chase’s deeper message: that we experience and remember in short bursts of insight, terror, comedy, and love. As ambitious in its form as it is in its radical candor, The Tooth Fairy is the rare memoir that can truly claim to remake the genre. .
