At thirty-nine, Peter returns to Bayview, the Baby Boom suburb where he spent his formative years. He checks into a crummy hotel and decides, in a moment of inspiration, to seek out his long lost childhood friend, Willy Smithberger. He’s banking on Smithberger. He’s hoping if he reunites with Smithberger he might connect to something, that something might be revealed. He’s hoping he might find a way-out of his long-festering pain and suffering and despair. But it’s not as simple as he might’ve wished. Smithberger proves to be something of a white whale, a difficult-to-apprehend quarry. On writing Suburban Boy: I’ve always thought I was fortunate to have grown up in the Baby Boom suburbs of Long Island. Mine was a decidedly middleclass suburb, overflowing with kids. The days were marked by the sounds and images of the sixties, Cronkite announcing JFK’s death, the Beatles, protestors slamming the Viet Nam war. My sense of life was formed in that atmosphere, in the troubled environment of my suburban family, in the strange days that followed. In writing Suburban Boy I was interested in digging, as deeply as possible, into my feelings about these things, that place, that time. At its heart, the novel is about two subjects that have always been important to me: friendship and the idea of home.

Adrian Bristow came not from a working- or upper class background, but from that great unsung mass - the lower middle-class. Adrian Bristow describes what it was like to grow up in the 1930s in an ordinary suburban family. He enjoyed a childhood radically different from that experienced by children today: so much that he took for granted has disappeared completely or changed utterly. What Adrian took for granted becomes, on reflection, quite extraordinary and it is the essence of this difference that he has recaptured in this book. Illustrated with a wide range of family photographs and images of south-east London, Suburban Boy will be a highly enjoyable read for anyone who delights in memoirs of childhoods past.

Howard Arkley's neon airbrush paintings of Australian suburban houses and their interiors represented this country at the 1999 Venice Biennale. Arkley's work has been compared to a visual equivalent of the monologues of Barry Humphries. Arkley was also a wild man. This concise account describes the artistic breakthroughs, his relationship with Nick Cave and the Birthday Party, and the heroin which killed him soon after his talent was recognised around the world. It is the fascinating story of a highly gifted artist who took suburbia seriously.

Two cousins, one from the city and one from the suburbs, spend a day and a night together at each other's house, and decide that each likes his own home better.

In Adventures of a Suburban Boy, John Boorman, hailed by the Observer as 'arguably Britain's greatest living director', offers an enthralling memoir of a creative life spent turning dreams into celluloid, and money into light.One of cinema's authentic visionaries, Boorman nevertheless enjoyed an archetypal English suburban boyhood in the 1940s and 50s, attending Catholic school and finding his first employment in a dry-cleaner's. But his abiding passion was for film, and he got his first break during the 'gold rush' era of British television in the 1960s. After directing several innovative documentaries for the BBC, he graduated to motion pictures, first filming pop stars The Dave Clark Five for Catch Us If You Can, before venturing to Los Angeles to make his first Hollywood picture - and his first masterpiece - Point Blank. The film inaugurated Boorman's profound friendship with star Lee Marvin, which also led to a second professional collaboration on Hell in the Pacific.What follows are accounts of Boorman's joys and agonies in the making of such extraordinary pictures as the terrifying backwoods adventure Deliverance, the fantastical epics Zardoz and Exorcist II: The Heretic, the glorious Arthurian legend Excalibur, his magnificent drama of imperilled Amazonian tribes, The Emerald Forest, and his semi-autobiographical, multi-Oscar-nominated Hope and Glory. Among the many friends and collaborators of whom Boorman offers vivid portraits are Lee Marvin, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Marcello Mastroianni, Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Helen Mirren and Nicol Williamson.

When Marian DeCaro, aged 40, checked into the hospital to have a melon-sized tumor removed from her uterus, the doctors found behind it little Frank, desperate for attention. And thus begins the saga of a boy named Phyllis. This humorous, witty, often touching memoir about the trials and tribulations of growing up an only child, a little pudgy and gay from the get-go, in the aluminum-sided walls of Little Falls, New Jersey, offers an antidote to the angst-ridden gay memoir.

This book offers a critical study of the writer and director's feature films as well as lesser-known works for television.