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Gloria Steinem Blurbed Me
(And Other Miracles)
Andrew Merton
Follow journalist, poet, rock guitarist, Boston Celtic (for five days), and women's rights/LGBTQ+ activist Andrew Merton's moving, often tongue-in-cheek journey from the McCarthy era of the early 50s on through Vietnam and the Millennium to the current, unsettled American scene. A provocative page-turner.
What Others Say About Gloria Steinem Blurbed Me
In Gloria Steinem Blurbed Me (And Other Miracles), Andrew Merton deftly weaves two stories: a reflection on the shifting cultural and political climate of the late twentieth century and a writer's poignant coming-of-age. With candor, wit, and courage, this layered memoir chronicles Merton's evolution from young teacher to respected journalist, feminist, activist, tender poet. The result is a slyly moving narrative of a changing life in a changing world.
—Elise Juska, author of Reunion
Andrew Merton is a journalist and poet whose words bubble like a New York City seltzer, molecules of fact blasted with extra oxygen into effervescence. Sip slowly the prose and poetry of his life, served here in such refreshing fashion.
—Tom Haines, author of Walking to the Sun: A Journey through America's Energy Landscapes
In Gloria Steinem Blurbed Me, Andrew Merton—journalist, essayist, poet—takes us on a sprawling and fully-lived journey: from his beginnings as a young Jew coming of age in Greenwich Village, to his college years in New Hampshire finding himself through rock and roll. As Merton navigates the early stages of his career as a magazine journalist, the reader gets a front row seat to some of America's most iconic cultural moments: from the emergence of the modern Feminist Movement and its adjacent dramas and fumbles, to the arrival of a new form of literary storytelling, where Merton brings us to—literally—center court of Celtics Nation. Stylistically, Merton holds nothing back: the memoir is part reportage, part memoir, part poem—and all story. This is the document of a man who has devoted himself to the wide-eyed project of American Life, told through the stories that define him—and us.
—Jaed Coffin, author of Roughhouse Friday
Gloria Steinem Blurbed Me (And Other Miracles) is a deeply thoughtful, dynamic book tracing the author's long, discursive path through loss, love, politics and poetry while encountering the presence of the title character and other luminaries along the way. Merton holds wisdom up to the light, turns it, renders marvels from new dispersion--in an off-the-cuff voice full of wisecrack humor. (Had Kurt Vonnegut and Nora Ephron had a son together, he would have sounded like this.) Throughout, there is a matter-of-fact, even relaxed, awareness of mortality, much like the "grizzled hound" in the book's closing poem, circling before the fire, "looking for a place to settle." Thankfully, he never does.
—Jessica Hendry Nelson, author of If Only You People Could Follow Directions
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Chapter 1: Greenwich Village
My alter egos appeared at different times in my life. L.T. was born in 1963
as a macho stud. Over the next 20 years he evolved into a surrealistic,
manic fellow, occasionally sporting a boa. Alfred, was born in 1819 and
died in 1901, concurrent with the life of Queen Victoria. In the early 1990s
he was reluctantly reborn in my orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain
in which, it is hypothesized, selves are created. He has remained a fixed
and stubborn figure ever since. For now I will tell you only that L.T. wrote
a fair number of my poems, and that without Alfred it is likely that none
of them would have been published.
Long, long before that, though, there emerged the shadow figure of
a three-year-old boy named Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga.
The original portrait of Manuel, familiar to many as Goya's Red Boy,
hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. But I first encountered
him on a visit with my mother, Felice Merton, to the apartment of my
maternal grandparents, Harry and Lillian (Wyzanski) Harris, on the
upper west side of New York City, where a framed reproduction of the
portrait hung in the dim light of their living room. That was in March or
early April of 1947, when I myself was not quite three.
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Details and Ordering
Publication Date: August 15, 2026
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-961127-27-2
Price: $25.00
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About the Author
Andrew Merton has been a reporter/columnist for the Boston Herald Traveler and the Boston Sunday Globe. His journalism and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, Esquire, Ms. Magazine, Glamour, and Boston Magazine. His book Enemies of Choice: The Right-to-Life Movement and Its Threat to Abortion (with a blurb by Gloria Steinem) was published by Beacon Press in 1981. His poetry has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Rialto, Comstock Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Louisville Review, The American Journal of Nursing, and elsewhere. He is the author of four books of poetry, all published by Accents Publishing: Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs (with a foreword by Charles Simic; 2012), Lost and Found (2016), Final Exam (2019), and Killer Poems (2023). He is a professor emeritus of English at the University of New Hampshire.
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