THE HOUSE OF HIDDEN MEANINGS
A Memoir
by RuPaul
Dey Street Books. 244 pages, $29.99
IN THE 1990s, Dolly Parton helped me bond with my first serious boy-friend. We were obsessed with her memoir Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, where she talks about losing weight by chewing food and spitting it out in a cup. That book was my introduction to Parton’s legend of growing up poor in the Tennessee mountains with a gaggle of siblings—and, of course, the coat of many colors that her mother lovingly stitched for her from rags. Parton is now pushing eighty, and she’s still talking about that damn coat. Like many successful celebrities, she burnished her rags-to-riches story early on, sold it as a brand, and has since repackaged it in everything from TV movies to cake mixes. This is lucrative but not very interesting. Why doesn’t she ever tell us anything new?
I thought about this while reading RuPaul’s latest book, The House of Hidden Meanings. This memoir is the fourth book from the world’s most famous drag queen, who cemented his celebrity status in the 1990s with his hit single “Supermodel” and now inhabits popular culture with his long-running reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race, with its many international spin-offs. Longtime fans won’t learn much new here. This memoir once again tracks the drag superstar’s origin story, this time from a pop psychology perspective. As a Scorpio, RuPaul sees himself as “a detective of the universe, searching the house for clues, trying to understand what it all meant.”
Michael Quinn writes about books in a monthly column for the Brooklyn newspaper The Red Hook Star-Revue and on his website, which is at mastermichaelquinn.com.
