Alex's Reviews > Boys Keep Swinging: A Memoir

Music can be a formative part of a person’s life. Scissor Sisters informed a large part of this writer’s late teens and early twenties, and a debt of gratitude is owed to Jake Shears. Fortunately Shears doesn’t require special treatment to receive a positive review for Boys Keep Swinging, a memoir that maybe ends too early, but contains a lot of poignant material.

Boys Keep Swinging covers the life of Jason “Jake Shears” Sellards from his parents’ courtship through to the moment that they started recording their mega-hit second album Ta-Dah. It is important to note that this is the terminus, because you miss out on two great albums, years in the wilderness, and whatever the heck has happened since. (From my perspective, and I don’t often bring myself in on these things: I never really knew or accepted that the band broke up in 2012).

The first 55% of Boys Keeps Swinging covers the pre-Scissor Sisters years and, because this story is Shears’ alone to tell, it’s the most intriguing and fleshed out part of the book. One day we might not get to read the memoirs of gay people who grew up easy, because that would probably be dull. Shears paints a picture of a child who desired films that featured “anything even resembling a Muppet”, born late to parents of much older siblings. Shears studied literature after high school, and it shows in prose that is deeply connected to his past, words that speak of both love and frustration.
This is the period of his life that Shears is most reconciled with, and it helps that his parents and various living situations are inherently fascinating; to be cursed with a prosaic childhood is the memoirist’s nightmare. Given his father’s vintage - fifty at the time of Shears’ birth - it is heartening to see the ultimately positive reception both of his parents paid to their son’s sexuality, even if Dan Savage duffed it.

When Shears shifts to New York, he waxes lyrical on a city that has changed greatly since he moved there. He effortlessly conjures the imagery of clubs that the reader may never have known about, and will never get the chance to see. There is a poetry to his description of a citywide blackout, and something tickles about knowing that just before Scissor Sisters officially became a thing that he was playing Zelda (presumably The Wind Waker).

The tenor of the book changes when Scissor Sisters proper enters the scene. Shears is surprisingly frank about the other members of the band: Ana Matronic is acknowledged as a force of nature on stage - their live performances are defined by her presence - but Shears is vicious about her part in the early phases of recording, and at times on tour - the sort of thing you possibly wouldn’t want to see said about yourself in print. (Matronic now appears to be based in London, and declined to be interviewed in a recent profile of Shears in the New York Times.) Del Marquis receives many mentions in relation to being unsure of what he makes of the band and, frustratingly, repeated mention is made to a mysterious bone illness that he is suffering from that is never resolved one way or another.

More than this, Shears changes completely as a person the moment that he finds success. Having spent his entire life striving for something, he is mentally unprepared for having attained it. A lot of the pages about promoting Scissor Sisters and touring the album is so wracked with misery that Shears has to assure the reader that there were good times on the road. It is clear that Shears has had to work through a lot in the last fourteen years, and that he is now in a better place, but one can leave this book not entirely certain if he’s completely past his pains. One takeaway that you will get is that Elton John is a good man to have on your side, and you’d be lucky to have him as a confidante. This advice may be too lofty for the common man, but it’s good to know.

Ending on the eve of Scissor Sisters’ biggest success is a tease. It is doubtful that Shears is planning a sequel, and he may consider this the definitive account of his life - or he may have seen that as the pressure mounts on his mental health, it was becoming heavy for the reader as well as himself. Regardless, there are many mysteries that remain unsolved, and if you want to know what “happened” to Scissor Sisters, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Boys Keep Swinging is not without its flaws: perhaps Shears wrote it over a long period and it spent almost three years in editorial before publication, because he speaks of his long-term partner between these pages as if they were still together. They broke up in 2015; perhaps the why and the how is not our business but, despite the narrative wrapping up somewhere around 2006, Boys Keep Swinging was published outside of a time capsule. It’s a small thing, but it forms an impression that is instantly dispelled with a moment’s external investigation.
Shears also structures much of the book around his relationship with Mary, the basis of one of Scissor Sisters’ singles, but it’s difficult to get a handle on what she was like. It becomes increasingly clear that, as Shears’ success grew, his anxiety, depression and guilt all grew exponentially. There is an impression that Shears bears a great pain over his relationship with Mary, and between these pages he hasn’t achieved the catharsis that he potentially craved.

Boys Keep Swinging is a memoir that offers fascinating details that you never would have found elsewhere, but is frustratingly elusive on the facts that a reader might have come for. You will come away knowing a lot about Shears, but he keeps enough of himself private that you aren’t able to know the man that he has become. Surprisingly, Boys Keep Swinging isn’t one for fans only: it’s not great as a showbiz memoir, but it is luminescent as the recollections of a gay man who came of age in the latter days of the twentieth century.