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About Third Girl From The Left: A Memoir
Product Description As a middle child in a large military family, Christine just wants to dance. Her parents support her dreams, even if they seem beyond their comprehension. At 20, determined and talented, Christine heads across the country from Santa Fe to New York City and, in a made for-Hollywood story, is chosen for the London cast of A Chorus Line. While unwilling to fully cut ties with the traditional life her parents envision for her, she finds a new family with the dancers and more fluid, open characters that fill the theater world in London, and later New York, in the ‘70s & ‘80s. Christine learns that one member of her family is equally at home in her new world: Laughlin, her older brother—divorced, a father, ex-military and a corporate lawyer—also makes his way to New York City, where he meets, and begins to build a life, with rising fashion star Perry Ellis. The two men enjoy a partnership and a financial success that Christine both admires. and envies. She spends much of her free time in their Upper West Side brownstone and Water Island retreat. Soon everyone is talking about a mysterious new disease. As deaths of dancers, theater folk, and eventually friends start to mount, Christine realizes she’s in the middle of an epidemic that neither her traditional family nor the public at large is ready to reckon with. As the AIDS crisis cuts closer and closer, eventually impacting those she loves most, Christine does what she has always done: she strikes her own path. This memoir is an emotional, honest examination of what it takes to succeed in the competitive world of New York theater, how hard-won dreams can be quickly lost, what it means to redefine family, and the devastating toll AIDS exacted on a generation of artists. Review “A heart-rending debut infuses a graceful personal narrative with cultural history.... Third Girl From The Left is a timely chronicle of vulnerable people who are marginalized by their government, ignored by the media and maligned by a ‘moral majority’ whose echoes reverberate in today’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ era.... Barker’s memoir becomes an elegy—for the third girl on the left, and the men she loved so well.” — New York Times Book Review “Third Girl from the Left is a beautifully written memoir of life on the Broadway stage at the onset of the 1980s AIDS epidemic. This compelling, and remarkably hopeful story is particularly relevant now. With uncompromising truth, Christine Barker makes tangible the unraveling of dreams, as she dances in A Chorus Line while her older brother, Laughlin, together with his life partner Perry Ellis, builds the designer’s fashion business. Time is an enemy and choices dwindle as the author is an eyewitness to a disaster that shapes her future even as it claims the lives of men she loves.” — Mara Liasson, National Political Correspondent, NPR “Christine Barker’s Third Girl from the Left is a gorgeous show-biz tapestry from the late golden years of the Broadway musical; it is the story of a dazzled ingénue dancer’s passage through that world; and it is also, at the same time, an intimate, profoundly mature portrait of the loves and dependencies among one American family gripped by the devastating AIDS crisis of the nineteen-eighties. Beautifully written, beautifully choreographed, and heartbreaking.” — Vijay Seshadri, 2014 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 3 Sections, James Laughlin Award winner for The Long Meadow, and author of Wild Kingdom and The Disappearances “Third Girl from the Left is bursting with life, friendship, love, family, dancing, and deaths, made crueler by the shame, silence and ostracism of gay men, including the author’s brother. What makes this book so special is that these lives and deaths during the Reagan era are rendered with clarity, intelligence and… are vivid and intimate as if they were happening now to the grateful reader. This is a wonderful book, illuminating, moving, impossible not to keep reading, until, sadly, you are at the end.
