Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera

Composer Gordon’s ungainly debut autobiography teeters unsteadily between illuminating and off-putting. Beginning with his birth on Long Island in 1956 and plodding forward to 2024, Gordon provides an exhaustive and often lurid look at the art and experiences that shaped him. Early sections focus on Gordon’s sexually tangled youth, during which he developed an incestuous attraction to his father (never acted upon) and, by 15, equated “older heterosexual men... having sex with me” with affection. A love of music, and opera in particular, grounded him. Admitted to Carnegie Mellon at age 16, he studied piano, composition, and acting. While discussing the intricacies of his own compositions, Gordon touches on how artists including Joni Mitchell and Stephen Sondheim influenced him. After he graduates from Carnegie Mellon and makes a name for himself, the book dishes on these and other legendary figures, sharing uncomfortable anecdotes about “sitting with a... clearly jonesing Liza Minelli” and developing tense rivalries with playwright Tony Kushner and composer Adam Guettel. The effect is overstimulating and undernourishing, with affecting threads about addiction and AIDS-era New York crowded out before they can be fully developed. Gordon’s rationale—that other artists might benefit from knowing about his “messy, disgusting, glorious, shameful” evolution—fails to justify this undisciplined ramble. It’s a disappointment. (July)