A Reading Candle

Fifth-anniversary edition — with a new preface by the author and a foreword by Professor Jessica Yood

On the night of Anchorage's worst blizzard, a twelve-year-old and his mother drive home through the dark in a battered Mustang with one working headlight. Raised by Abby, a devout Marine veteran, and by Victoria, his free-spirited Abuela, Matthew Frye-Castillo grows up gay in a fundamentalist church, breaks away from it and a father he feared, reinvents himself as a writer in New York, then returns to Alaska at twenty-six to support his dying mother. Both a queer coming-of-age story and a grief memoir, One Headlight: A Son's Memoir is a portrait of three lives lit by one another's love.

Praise for One Headlight

“A beautifully written coming-of-age story, a tribute to a gorgeously flawed and surprisingly resilient family. In these pages, Frye-Castillo captures all the grace and grit of the ‘real’ Alaska, where poverty, homophobia, and evangelical small-town life exist side-by-side with a lifesaving public school system, a culture of LGBTQ pride, and coffee kiosks that accept IOUs.… But most profoundly, One Headlight offers a portrait of the deep and difficult love between a son and his mother and grandmother.… This memoir is like no other book I have read. It will entertain you as it crushes you.” —Martha Amore, author of In the Quiet Season and the Lambda-nominated anthology Building Fires in the Snow

“Prose [that] is frank and insightful, finding the lyricism in everyday objects, turns of phrase, and locales.… His portrait of Abby is the soul of the book, and she’s revealed as a larger-than-life character who exhibits real problems and who causes problems for the author, as well. However, she never loses the reader’s sympathy thanks to his nuanced, nonjudgmental portrayal. The result is a moving rumination on the varying roles that a mother can play in a son’s life, for better and for worse. An affecting and surprising remembrance about the responsibilities of parents and children.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A beautiful, moving queer coming-of-age memoir set in Alaska with a narrative voice that is funny, sensitive and emotionally sharp. For fans of Garrard Conley, Garth Greenwell, and Brandon Taylor.” —Naheed Phiroze Patel, author of Mirror Made of Rain

“More than another coming-of-age story. It is a love letter to his mother, Abby, a lively woman, who navigates the world with humor and humility, doing her best with the hand she was dealt, both for herself and for the son she so clearly adores.” —Lucian Childs, author of Dreaming Home

“[A heartfelt coming-of-age memoir] … One Headlight well illuminates the necessary pain of separating from our mothers to become who we are—and the way we continually return to them, and to who we were, to understand who that is.” —Red Hook Star-Revue

“Depictions of working-class, poverty-level Alaska [that] counterbalance the usual tropes of Alaska as a sublime wilderness.” —Anchorage Daily News

“Quirky humor, bright language, and sharp emotional insight.” —Joe Okonkwo, author of Jazz Moon

“[An] inspirational story of resilience and fortitude … about learning to appreciate those who supported you … [and finding] the welcoming energy of New York and the power of a quiet drive with those one loves.” —Chelsea News New York

Details

Trade paperback · 254 pages · 5.06 × 7.81 in
ISBN 979-8-9958235-0-6
Volupté Press. Originally published by Cirque Press (2021).