Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation
Growing up in places where his family had no past, and met mostly by silence from his Holocaust-refugee grandparents, Michael Lowenthal longed to be from somewhere. Then he realized he was gay and felt displaced from his own displaced family. Place Envy—his first book of essays after five acclaimed books of fiction—chronicles his quest for orientation in the world: as an agnostic Jew, as a queer traveler and lover, and as a writer who can tell or twist the truth.
Yearning for a queer lineage, he obsesses about an uncle who perished at Bergen-Belsen but then finds, in his grandmother's German hometown, a more surprising legacy. He lives with a Pennsylvania Amish family; accompanies blind gay men on a Mexican cruise; plays jazz with Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist who claimed to hail from Saturn; and pursues a clarifying love affair in Brazil. Collectively, these essays recount Lowenthal's many journeys of dislocation and relocation: to foreign countries and subcultures and to the riskiest shores of family and self.
Praise for Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation
"Through nuanced encounters with both self and other, Place Envy takes us on a vivid and, at times, searing journey. What does it mean to love and be loved? How does one queer, Jewish writer stave off loneliness, form connections, make art, and come to understand his place in the world? Michael Lowenthal's journey in this beautiful book is riveting and full of unexpected turns." Elizabeth Graver, author of Kantika
"Enlightening and heartfelt, Place Envy is laugh-out-loud funny and find-the-tissues moving. In each essay, Lowenthat explores love, family, sex, and faith, all the while asking what world, what place, can hold us all and all that we contain. His prose can elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant and yet feel as familiar as a dear friend. This book is a beautiful testament to both his skill as a writer and his heart as a seeker." Lyz Lenz, author of This American Ex-Wife
"Place Envy is an engrossing and provocative book. Lowenthal is a vivid narrator of his journeys as a young gay man, sharing his travels by car, bus, plane, Amish buggy, and cruise ship from Brookline to Buchau and Scotland to Salvador, Brazil. Throughout, he never hesitates to approach the third rail—and then grasp it. Beautifully written and crafted, the story reaches back generations as it explores the tortuous interplay between where you are and who you are." Will Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club
"The question 'Where am I?' sometimes asks for a kind of orientation that no GPS can provide. So it is for Michael Lowenthal—a gay Jew from a family of Holocaust refugees—in this brilliantly written and, in the end, deeply moving account of a years-long passage from inner homelessness to home at last." Jack Miles, coauthor of A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life