In this memoir of fathers and sons, Gregory Martin struggles to reconcile the father he thought he knew with a man who has just survived a suicide attempt; a man who had been having anonymous affairs with men throughout his thirty-nine years of marriage; and who now must begin his life as a gay man. At a tipping point in our national conversation about gender and sexuality, rights and acceptance, Stories for Boys is about a father and a son finding a way to build a new relationship with one another after years of suppression and denial are given air and light.
Martin’s memoir is quirky and compelling with its amateur photos and grab-bag social science and literary analyses. He explores the impact his father’s lifelong secrets have upon his life now as a husband and father of two young boys with humor and bracing candor. Stories for Boys is resonant with conflicting emotions and the complexities of family sympathy, and asks the questions: How well do we know the people that we think we know the best? And how much do we have to know in order to keep loving them?
Awards
Number 8 on the Independent Bestseller List for Paperback Nonfiction!
Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association
Related News
Gregory Martin’s Stories for Boys included in Pacific Northwest Independent Bestseller List!
Gregory Martin’s Stories for Boys included in Pacific Northwest Independent Bestseller List for Paperback Nonfiction!
Gregory Martin’s Stories for Boys reviewed in Green Mountains Review
This is a book that works like the mind itself in a state of trauma, attacking its focal point from all angles, then circling around to try again. In the course of this dance, Stories for Boys...Forward
Gregory Martin interviewed by Mary Ann Gwinn in the Seattle Times
Some books hold hard truths but offer a life ring of hope and even humor in an ocean of sadness. Stories for Boys, Gregory Martin’s memoir of his family’s coming to terms with the fact that his...Forward
Gregory Martin: No Sweat, by Marilyn Dahl for Shelf Awareness
“I remember reading at Elliott Bay and sweat pouring down my face like Robert Duvall in The Apostle, and Christine coming up the aisle and giving me one of Oliver’s cloth diapers to mop my face....Forward
Stories for Boys by Gregory Martin chosen by the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Book Club
The Seattle Gay and Lesbian Book Club has chosen Gregory Martin’s memoir, Stories for Boys as their May read! If you want to read along with both the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Book Club and the Seattle...Forward
Related Blog Posts
Gregory Matin blogs for the Seattle Times, "When Jason Collins and my father coming out will no longer matter."
Posted by Gregory Martin on 18 May 2013
You want to read this blog by Greg Martin:
My father, six years ago, did what NBA player Jason Collins did. He didn’t do it on the cover of Sports Illustrated, like Collins did. My father first...Forward
Seattle Reads 2013 Chooses Gregory Martin's Memoir Stories for Boys!
Posted by Liz Crain on 05 March 2013
Hawthorne Books prides itself on strong relationships with our authors and Stories for Boys author Gregory Martin is one such author that we get along famously with not only because he does things...Forward
Media love for Gregory Martin's memoir Stories for Boys
Posted by Ann Marie Schott on 26 February 2013
Gregory Martin’s memoir Stories for Boys was chosen for Seattle Reads, a common-reading program sponsored by the Seattle Public Library Foundation. The memoir was also featured by Barnes &...Forward
Making sense of memory: questions for Gregory Martin from Sally McPherson
Posted by Sally McPherson on 09 October 2012
Along with her business partner Roberta Dyer, Sally McPherson owns Portland-based independent bookstore Broadway Books, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. She interviewed Hawthorne...Forward
No faith in memory: Greg Martin talks about Stories for Boys
Posted by Craig Mather on 06 August 2012
In his memoir Stories for Boys, Gregory Martin struggles to reconcile the father he thought he knew with a man who has just survived a suicide attempt; a man who had been having anonymous affairs...Forward
Praise for Stories for Boys
With clean vivid descriptions, and ruthless soul-wrenching self examination, Greg Martin bravely tells a story he never imagined having to tell. The reader is privileged here, to be allowed to watch as he wrestles with his sons, his own belief systems, his urge toward forgiveness and even Walt Whitman. This finely made, deeply felt memoir restores our faith in the power of language and story to make sense of a broken world.
- Pam Houston
- Author of Contents May Have Shifted
Stories for Boys is a charming and moving coming-of-age story, its narrator situated in the pivotal position between being his father’s son and his sons’ father. So refreshing and unique is Martin’s treatment of the material that the reader will never mistake this book for its inferior competitors dealing with similar subjects (suicide, latent homosexuality, child abuse). One hopes this is the new wave of memoir: stories of people whose lives are not easily categorized nor dismissed. It is a sweet read.
- Antonya Nelson
- Author of Bound
Gregory Martin’s Stories for Boys is a magnetic meditation on what happens when a decades-long lie is brutally revealed. Moving, brave, and unforgettable, this deeply personal book pushes us all further into the light.
- Cheryl Strayed
- Author of Wild
Besides his ability to write sentences of utter devastation, Martin also weaves evocative comparisons between his father and the life and writings of Walt Whitman. He makes the book all the more distinctive and accessible by including emails from his father, family photos, children’s drawings, tree house diagrams and pop culture images. Stories for Boys is, in essence, stories for everyone.
- Los Angeles Review
Most crucially, it is a book about truth and reconciliation, of one man with his father and his sons, and of a culture that is changing in terms of what we teach boys about sex, but not quickly enough for our children to be unscathed.
- Molly Beer
- The Rumpus
[Stories for Boys] becomes profoundly touching as [Gregory Martin] takes himself to task, and over it all presides the spirit of his guiding light and inspiration, Walt Whitman, able to become sympathetic with any passing stranger, open to all, forgiving to all.
- Nick DiMartino
- Shelf Awareness
Unexpectedly relatable and gripping, Stories for Boys chronicles the healing and, most importantly, love within a family.
- Daniel Tehrani
- Out Magazine
Throughout, the reader may wonder who these stories for boys are for. For the author’s sons, as counterpoints to the sandwiched way the author now must respond to a new normal? For Martin himself, as he works, and sometimes fails, to find his dad amid the sins of the father? For the abused and tormented little boy his father once was and who, despite his behavior, needs the succor of story as much as his son? For all of them, of course, who are fortunate they have Martin to tell them.
- Lisa Romeo
- ForeWord Reviews
Through the examination of silences in his family, Martin artfully and honestly addresses the taboo topics of suicide, child abuse, and hidden homosexuality. These are stories that need to be told.
- Sarah Seybold
- Propeller
This is a book for anyone who is a parent, and anyone who has parents. It is a few moments on a lifelong journey of learning empathy that resonates with loud and small echoes of love.
- Jennifer Spruit
- Prism International
Stories for Boys is the repressed Western cousin of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother? In place of Bechdel’s obsessive perseveration, Martin gives us almost taciturn access to a shifting emotional landscape. Here we can see what it means to learn to love someone in a new way, in the long time after the moment when everything changes. This is not a comfortable space, but it is where most of us live most of the time and we’re lucky to have Martin as a guide and cartographer.
- Andra Hibbert
- Apt
Some books hold hard truths but offer a life ring of hope and even humor in an ocean of sadness. Stories for Boys, Gregory Martin’s memoir of his family’s coming to terms with the fact that his father is a closeted gay man, is such a book.
- Mary Ann Gwinn
- The Seattle Times
This is a book that works like the mind itself in a state of trauma, attacking its focal point from all angles, then circling around to try again. In the course of this dance, Stories for Boys becomes a tale of anger and sadness, confusion and wonder, and then, only in the end, once all the possibilities have been exhausted, into one of familial reconciliation against all odds.
- Will Donnelly,
- Green Mountains Review