A powerful hybrid memoir exploring the connections between father and son, addiction and disease, and what it really means to be a man, from an award-winning queer journalist
Growing up in and around New York City, all Mat really knew of his father, Tofi, was that he loved to cook, he loved to dance, and he was, for the most part, completely absent from his family's life. As Mat grew older, he realized his father was an addict despite his mother's silence on the subject, and he realized that he himself was gay, a revelation that was met only with "Don't get AIDS," a stinging blow to young Mat.
But it was not until Tofi was on his deathbed that his son learned his father had been HIV-positive for all of Mat's life. The two had had such different, disparate lives; yet lives that ran parallel to each other all the while, and this set Mat on a journey to truly understand his father's story, as well as his own.
Tough Guy is a moving debut memoir that combines Mat's story of growing up as a gay Puerto Rican American with binge-eating disorder alongside his father's story of growing up poor in the Lower East Side and turning to heroin as an escape route.
Mathew Rodriguez seeks to pinpoint the ways in which Tofi embodied a nexus of major cultural shifts: his parents' flight from Puerto Rico to New York City in the 1940s, just as the construction of the city's first affordable housing projects was underway; the rise of the heroin crisis in the U.S. during his teenage years, when he began using; and the insidious spread of the virus that would come to be known as HIV, lurking unnamed for decades before what history has thus far deemed the start of the AIDS crisis.
In tracing the arc of his father's life, Rodriguez asks his readers to widen the lens of our cultural memory of whom the AIDS crisis affected, zooming out from our focus on cis-gay white men to center the people of color and drug users also lost to the disease, a too often forgotten piece of our collective history.
Through historical research and examination, as well as family stories passed down, Rodriguez take the reader on the journey of understanding just how complicated, heartbreaking, and beautiful being a person in this world is, as we all have to make our choices within the contexts we can't control.
Ultimately, Tough Guy is a stunning memoir of forgiveness and understanding.
Praise
“Mathew Rodriguez’s Tough Guy expands the genre of memoir to meet our contemporary moment. It is a personal history, a familial history, a geography of New York City, a map of viral infection, an aftershock of addiction, and a lasting portrait of the imprint of a father on a son. With authoritative research and remarkable emotional honesty, Rodriguez uncovers the words too often whispered just out of earshot. This book is a reminder that every individual is formed by language, by family, by place, by health, and by politics. Memory, in Tough Guy, can never be only personal; it is always collective, in a way that’s nearly always unexplored in memoir. Rodriguez’s prose is incisive, precise, and emotionally devastating. Tough Guy taught me a new history of my nation, my city, and my own body. I left this story forever changed.”
—Joseph Osmundson, author of Virology, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist in Nonfiction
“He writes eloquently, with calmness, certainty, and great heart. . . . A touching and memorable tribute to a father.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Mathew Rodriguez tells the story of a father, a son, and a family, set against the backdrop of decades of New York City in transition and transformation and of the AIDS epidemic—its history, its legacy, and its toll. Tough Guy is clear-eyed, deeply researched, and achingly personal, shot through with both love and rage.”
—Linda Villarosa, The New York Times Magazine contributing writer and author of the book Under the Sk
“This compassionate and loving memoir expands many legacies: the classic New Yorker, Puerto Rican immigration and Nuyorican life, gay men building a self, public housing, how HIV hides in plain sight, families and children of addicts, the journey of chronic illness, growing up a nerd, fat boys, the treasure of community, and more. But most importantly Mathew Rodriguez helps us accept ourselves, by his example, through honesty, facing reality, and the courage to change. Moving and vulnerable throughout, Tough Guy is a real accomplishment that will be meaningful to a wide range of readers.”
—Sarah Schulman, author of The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity
"This wrenching dual narrative candidly explores addiction, AIDS, and the ties that bind with equal parts righteousness and compassion. It’s an indelible family saga."
—Publishers Weekly
“Tough Guy is a unique father/son mem - oir, a feat of research and imagination. Drawing upon his years of reporting on the HIV community and his own powerful desire to understand, Rodriguez has created a compassionate and loving portrait of the father he hardly knew.”
Alysia Abbott, author of
internationally award-winning
memoir Fairyland
—
“Tough Guy is a brave and tender story of an elusive father battling HIV, a vibrant Lower East Side community, and an intrepid son who boldly attempts to piece it all together. It is equal parts gritty and luminous.”
—Ava Chin, author of Mott Street
