The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt

The author’s transformation from Southern California jock into “sexually neutered androgyne” began the summer after tenth grade, when he abruptly quit playing soccer, pierced his ears, and discovered lip gloss. Goulian’s choices have cost him professionally (he abandoned a law career, in part because of the staid dress requirements) and romantically (his “entanglements” last “on average, about forty-five minutes”), and this memoir functions as his “painful stab at self-analysis.” He arrives at a convincing, if tidy, explanation: his androgyny is an elaborate “act of regression,” a retreat from the expectations of adulthood. Goulian is endearingly candid about the lingering traumas of adolescence and the pressures of growing up in a family of overachievers, but his litany of “a thousand and one anxieties” ultimately grows tedious. ♦

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