I Was Better Last Night: A Memoir by Harvey Fierstein (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022)

—Jan Farrington

“A painter can never have too many colors. A writer can’t know too many words. An actor can’t access too many emotions. And there’s no such thing as having lived too much.”

With that, the legendary Harvey Fierstein—actor, playwright, activist, drag queen—ends his first (so far) memoir, I Was Better Last Night, leaving us to think: “Well, he ought to know.”

Because Harvey has lived a life.

Most of us know some of his story, at least in bits and pieces: The guy with the raspy voice (damaged in almost his first show, a downtown ‘70s musical in which untrained Harvey screamed his songs night after night). The playwright of Torch Song Trilogy, that theater touchstone of the AIDS years. Robin William’s gay brother in Mrs. Doubtfire. A voice in Disney’s Mulan. The original Big Mamma, Edna Turnblad in Hairspray. The much-awarded book writer of the musicals Newsies and Kinky Boots.

But there’s so much more to know.

Who better than Harvey to write about growing up cluelessly gender-fluid in middle-class 1950s Brooklyn? Applying his Mom’s makeup for Halloween, seven-year-old Harvey asks the mirror: Are you a girl? “Why would a child wonder such a thing? My mind was struggling with jigsaw-puzzle pieces that came in an unmarked box.”

His parents, a school librarian and a handkerchief salesman, were both theater buffs—and the family of four (Harvey has a much-loved older brother) saw the best Broadway shows, always from the front row of the mezzanine: West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Bye Bye Birdie, Gypsy, Oliver!—for about $2.50 a ticket.

Harvey, though his I.Q. tested off the charts, was an undiagnosed dyslexic. Play scripts were some of his favorite reading because they were all talk—and shorter than novels. He could draw, and was accepted by the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, a public school that trained students for careers in commercial art. But theater was calling his name; in the late ‘60s, he got involved with the Gallery Players in Brooklyn, a new community theater (still running today) with plenty of work, and parts, for volunteers.

Jump ahead to Harvey the Pratt student (still pursuing visual art), who got more and more notice as both an actor and playwright on the downtown theater scene. At the experimental La MaMa theater, he played a part in Andy Warhol’s Pork, the artist’s only stage play. He worked the “day jobs” actors need for income, got involved with the gay-rights movement, kept creating plays. He writes bluntly but with humor about the anonymous sex to be found in “the Trucks” parked downtown at night in those pre-AIDS days. He drank too much.

And he fell in love, and out of love, with touching regularity. Just as he was raised, Harvey grew up expecting to find a soul mate, get married, adopt some kids, live in the suburbs. Finding that proved elusive, though one has the impression he was a caring, kind-hearted diva to the men in his life.

Torch Song Trilogy put his theater career into warp-speed, first Off-Broadway and then in a Broadway production that won him two Tony Awards in 1983, for Best Play and Best Actor in a Play. (Carol Channing came backstage to croon: “This is the gay Raisin in the Sun.”)

And the rest is history—Harvey’s history, but the story is full of insightful glimpses of other people. He loved his parents, but wrote a brutal fight in Torch Song that was based on one he’d had with his mother. When he was “outed” as a teen, it was his father who turned toward him with compassion. Suddenly, Harvey writes, “I realized I’d been wasting my time on the wrong parent.”

I Was Better Last Night is sometimes hilarious, sometimes heart-tugging, and plenty dishy with stories about celebrities and events. He’s blunt about his very mixed experiences in Hollywood, about his favorite (and least fave) talk-show hosts, about differences within the LGBTQ+A community over the years. He paints quick and terrific portraits of show-biz people: Robin Williams, Matthew Broderick, Richard Chamberlain, Cyndi Lauper, and many more.

I’m glad I got to know this smart, funny, straight-talking Harvey. I know he’s been sober since the ‘90s—but I’d be glad to have a mocktail with him any old time.