3 окт 2016 г. - VOGUE iO Tillett Wright on Chronicling His Gritty Childhood in Darling Days

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iO Tillett Wright on Chronicling His Gritty Childhood in Darling Days
BY JULIA FELSENTHAL

iO Tillett Wright spent his childhood scribbling in 99-cent marble composition notebooks, chronicling his exploits and emotions in journals that he’s carted around from apartment to apartment ever since. It was a life less ordinary: Born a boy in a girl’s body to a pair of arch-eccentrics who parted ways soon after his birth, he grew up somewhere in between bohemian splendor and squalor in the East Village of the 1980s and ’90s, his world populated by characters familiar from Nan Goldin photographs. (Literally: Goldin is his godmother).

“I spent a lot of time alone,” Wright told me recently by phone. “In an apartment with no television, no screens of any kind, not always necessarily any more than candlelight. So [writing] became my method of getting things out of my head.”

That practice has served him well. Wright is best known as an activist, the photographer behind the Self Evident Truths project, and a cohost of the MTV reality show Suspect. And just last week, he published his first book—an evocative memoir of his first two decades called Darling Days. Written in diaristic dispatches, the book benefits greatly from “very detailed backup,” he explained, laughing.

The memoir begins with a letter from the author to his mother, Rhonna, and it’s in large part a portrait of their relationship. “They invented the word glamazon for women like my mother,” he writes. “Grace Jones had the same severity and stature. Mix one part unicorn, three parts thunderstorm, two parts wounded bull, and you’d have an approximation of the vibe.”

She may share Grace Jones’s defiant attitude and look, but Rhonna has none of the same luck. She is a dancer haunted by demons, whose behavior over time grows increasingly erratic, fueled by a toxic mixture of alcohol and prescription drugs. She is a mother both fiercely protective and domineering, as tolerant of her son’s investigations into his gender identity as she is intolerant of any attempt to live a life outside the cocoon she’d made for them. She exerts obsessive control: over their restrictive diets, over their endless schedule of mandatory dance classes, over Wright’s career as a budding child actor (after declaring himself a boy at six years old, he takes only male parts).

But they live in chaos, in a hoarder’s apartment absent any creature comforts on a particularly grim block of the pre-gentrified East Village, an area the police referred to as “the asshole of the universe.” They often go hungry. In one painful episode, the author accepts a dog from a pair of panhandling teenagers in Times Square, angers his mother by bringing it home, and lovingly cares for it for a few days—until its original owners steal it back. “It feels as though real kids live on the other side of some invisible glass,” he writes, “in a place where puppies aren’t gifts from teenage junkies and you get to hug them all night.”

At 13, Wright reports his mom to his school guidance counselor, and goes to live with his avant-garde director father in Germany. There, with the onset of puberty, sensing an opportunity to reinvent himself, the author decides to try out life as a girl. His dad accepts that transition as easily as he accepted the first one (“I’m not losing a son, I suppose. I’m gaining a daughter”). But, an addict with a long history of bad relationships, his father is as ill-suited as Rhonna to offer the security and stability Wright so desperately craves.

Ultimately Darling Days is about acceptance: the author’s parents’s unquestioning acceptance of their child’s declarations of identity; the author’s acceptance of his radically unconventional parents. It’s also about self-acceptance: The final third of the book takes us through Wright’s struggle to come to terms with his attraction to girls, and an ongoing negotiation of gender (he’s only recently come out as trans and began to embrace male pronouns).

The memoir also, compellingly, offers a stark lens onto downtown New York mid-metamorphosis, as the neighborhood transformed from the gritty artist’s mecca of the 1970s and ’80s, to the financiers’ playground that we now know. Wright recently fled his increasingly unrecognizable city for Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, where he’s fixing up a house. He wrote the book, he told me, while living on the west coast, “trying to completely change my life to be healthy,” he explained. “Because I wasn’t particularly healthy before I left New York. New York just fucking eats you.”

The city of his birth, he said, is in his bones and his blood, but he no longer needs to live there. “People think that going to New York and being a New Yorker is about wearing all black and toughing it out for ten years,” he added. “Actually, real New Yorkers will tell you the ticket is wintering somewhere warm. And being nice to people.”

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