Out East, John Glynn
Out East, John Glynn
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Out East
Memoir of a Montauk Summer

Author: John Glynn

Narrator: Michael Crouch

Unabridged: 6 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/14/2019


Synopsis

An "extraordinary" debut memoir of first love, identity, and self-discovery among a group of friends who became family in a Montauk summer house (Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner).
They call Montauk the end of the world, a spit of land jutting into the Atlantic. The house was a ramshackle split-level set on a hill, and each summer thirty-one people would sleep between its thin walls and shag carpets. Against the moonlight the house's octagonal roof resembled a bee's nest. It was dubbed The Hive.
In 2013, John Glynn joined the share house. Packing his duffel for that first Memorial Day Weekend, he prayed for clarity. At twenty-seven, he was crippled by an all-encompassing loneliness, a feeling he had carried in his heart for as long as he could remember. John didn't understand the loneliness. He just knew it was there. Like the moon gone dark.
Out East is the portrait of a summer, of The Hive and the people who lived in it, and John's own reckoning with a half-formed sense of self. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, The Hive was a center of gravity, a port of call, a home. Friendships, conflicts, secrets and epiphanies blossomed within this tightly woven friend group and came to define how they would live out the rest of their twenties and beyond.
Blending the sand-strewn milieu of George Howe Colt's The Big House with the radiant aching of Olivia Liang's The Lonely City, Out East is a keenly wrought story of love and transformation, longing and escape in our own contemporary moment.
"An unforgettable story told with feeling and humor and above all with the razor-sharp skill of a delicate and highly gifted writer." -- André Aciman, New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name
"Out East is full of intimacy and hope and frustration and joy, an extraordinary tale of emotional awakening and lacerating ambivalence, a confession of self-doubt that becomes self-knowledge." -- Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner
An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of May 2019A Time magazine Best Book of May 2019Cosmopolitan Best Book of May 2019An O, the Oprah Magazine Best LGBTQ Book of 2019

Reviews

Goodreads review by Hank on June 30, 2019

I expect people will have two wildly different reactions to this memoir: Some will find it a riveting and accurate (and moving) account of millennial living -- as it was experienced by privileged white young adults working in New York and binge-drinking their summer weekends away in Montauk, Long Is......more

Goodreads review by Erik on March 30, 2020

"Out East" by John Glynn is a surprisingly insufferable memoir of coming out in your 20s against a backdrop of hedonism, wealth, and privileged heterosexuality. John Glynn, an upper middle-class book editor, thought he was straight but felt deeply alone. After agreeing to spend $2000 to spend some we......more

Goodreads review by Dennis on January 27, 2020

While the audiobook narrator was phenomenal, this book really just was plain jane boring for me. There are people who don't need to come out in real life and I think that this would be a book for you to read. For those of us who do need to come out, this book is not anything you haven't already hear......more


Quotes

"Glynn is such a warm, elegant, and gorgeously precise writer...Like the best coming-of-age books, "Out East" is a tender, patient how-to manual, sketching a path to self-actualization, or at least to self-acceptance."—The New Yorker

"Glynn's memoir is perfectly evocative of long, lazy summers, taking place over a few months in Montauk and charting the blossoming of friendships, the heat of new romances, and the journeys to self-discovery."—Entertainment Weekly

"A moving account of the particular sort of loneliness that descends when you know you're unhappy but don't quite know why, and the boundless devotion of the chosen family who's there while you're figuring it out."—Oprah.com

"This book perfectly captures unrequited love and longing, as John struggles with growing feelings for his fellow vacationer... this one is staying on my shelf forever."—Cosmopolitan

"Sun-soaked and brimming with youth, Glynn's debut memoir chronicles a life-changing summer spent in a Montauk share house. With honesty, heart, and generosity, the memoir explores friendship, first love, and identity."—The Millions

"'We were sun children chasing an eternal summer.' This boisterous chronicle of a summer in Montauk sees a group of 20-something housemates who'll grow to know, to love, and care for one another. They work hard during the week, party hard on weekends, and each will face heartthrob and heartbreak. A coming out story told with feeling and humor and above all with the razor-sharp skill of a delicate and highly gifted writer."—Andre Aciman, New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name

"Out East is full of intimacy and hope and frustration and joy, an extraordinary tale of emotional awakening and lacerating ambivalence, a confession of self-doubt that becomes self-knowledge. It beautifully charts the dynamics of a group of people in a house share, but it's also about the emergence of its narrator into an exquisite emotional honesty. It's gripping and generous, and hidden in its rollicking naivete is a good measure of authentic wisdom."—Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner

"Out East personifies summer magic. [It] refashions the epic summer tale, dosed with lyrical brawn, grace, and ingenuity. Summer or not, sharing a cool pop with John Glynn's remarkable Out East will nudge you to believe in believing once again."—Lambda Literary

"Written with the same clarity and ebullience as E.B. White's 'Once More to the Lake,' if said essay were also infused with equal parts vodka, millennial angst, and sexual longing."—Chicago Review of Books

"No author has captured a millennial milieu better or with more empathy than John Glynn. Out East is a perfectly paced memoir and riveting portrait of a friend group. I loved it."—Anita Shreve, New York Times bestselling author of The Pilot's Wife and The Stars are Fire