Vonnegut wrote a Foreword in Sleepaway School: Stories from a Boy's Life—A Memoir, written by Lee Stringer and released in 2004. It is dated February 27, 2004 from New York City.
Summary[]
Mamaroneck, New York
Since all of this story happened to the author, it is properly a memoir rather than fiction, and the life it describes is still going on. Lee Stringer at fifty-four is "one hell of a good writer", having already written Grand Central Winter in 1998 about his time "riding around inside the body of a crack addict in New York City". This book is about his youth in the body of an "always fatherless, occasionally violent, African-American" with a mother on welfare. He attended a public school in the mostly white and prosperous suburb of Mamaroneck, New York, where he now resides again. He and Vonnegut have been friends since his first memoir, but with this work, Vonnegut told Stringer that he'd achieved "universality" by writing a Bildungsroman—a tale of the mental and physical development that occurs as a young human being becomes an adult, which happens to everyone. How Stringer tells this story, who this boy was, and the place where it happened are both insignificant and spectacular.[1]
See Also[]
- Like Shaking Hands with God, two conversations about writing between Vonnegut and Stringer published in 1999
- ↑ "Foreword", Sleepaway School, pp. ix-x.