PEOPLE
Dec 17, 2021
2 minutes
By Fiona Sturges
In a bonanza year for memoirs, Ruth Coker Burks got us off to a strong start with All the Young Men, a clear-eyed and poignant account of her years spent looking after Aids patients in Arkansas in the 1980s. Her book reveals the love and camaraderie of a hidden community fighting for its life.
Sadness and, an exuberant account of Paris Lees’s tearaway teenage years in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, where “the streets are paved wi’ dog shit”. Her gender nonconformity is just one aspect of an adolescence that also features bullying, violence, prostitution, robbery and a spell in a young off enders’ institute.
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