When he was 16, Edgar Gomez had gleaming new veneers glued to his top teeth. His freshly even smile was like a miracle: “I looked like the real me,” he writes, “not that other, shame-filled version of me I’d been living as before.” Despite wondering how he might pay for their upkeep, Gomez believed suddenly that “money would never be a problem again. … Images of myself as a doctor or a lawyer flashed behind my eyes, clinking wineglasses with my husband in our tasteful brownstone in Manhattan.”
This isn’t quite how things turn out in “Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays,” Gomez’s entertaining second memoir. But the veneer story is a tidy fractal, delivering in miniature much of the book’s message. The dazzling gnashers are a symbol, perhaps, of the humor and optimism with which Gomez faces hardship.
For a self-described queer “Nica-Rican mutt,” something about the veneers’ straightness and whiteness seems like a comment, as much of the book is, on the world’s uneven distribution of privilege. Perhaps his new smile will, like the stories he tells prospective boyfriends and employers, obscure his childhood disadvantages and lead to ever-greater success. But for all this, sometimes a veneer is just a veneer. As Gomez wrote recently, the expiration date for his false teeth has now passed, as the dentist foretold, and he’s scarcely better equipped to pay for new ones than he was as a high school junior.
For the review in full, visit The Los Angeles Times.
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