There's something essentially naked about novelist John Rechy. I mean more than the cliché that he writes the “naked truth” about marginal people living outside polite society, a theme struck yet again in About My Life and the Kept Woman [Grove, Feb.]. Nor does that refer to the blunt sexuality that grinds away at the lives fleetingly recollected in this beautiful first memoir. Rechy slips identities on and off like a winter coat. Born Mexican-American, he passes for Anglo. He plays the “straight” hustler, but he also needs to be desired by men in a way that's desperately compulsive. A tough guy of few words when working the street, he sneaks off to the library to read Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Each time he becomes someone else, we glimpse a little more of the person underneath, bared in small glances here or there. About My Life and the Kept Woman is a marvelous autobiography by a writer whose life is as interesting as his fiction.