Heretic

“Tuccille impresses the reader with his writing skills and his command of the English language. He has a great wit and a fine sense of style. His description is appropriately detailed and his imagery vivid and striking. He’s excellent at blending narrative with exposition. I found myself quite involved in the exciting, emotional, and traumatic incidents in his book. I was unable to put it down until I had finished reading it. This doesn’t happen often in the publishing field.”
—Ralph Ferraro, director
The Italian-American Press
www.italianamericanpress.com

“Jerome Tuccille's satiric memoir/history of the libertarian movement, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, might not be the most accurate book on the subject, but it's certainly the most entertaining; it belongs on the same shelf as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and other semi-fictional offshoots of the New Journalism. Now there's a prequel, Heretic, which describes Tuccille's earlier years. The book is an eminently readable collection of yarns, covering the author's roots in the Bronx, his travels around the globe, and his various religious conversions and sexual misadventures. (Those last two sometimes go hand-in-hand.) Tuccille is a talented storyteller, and he has a knack for bragging and mocking himself at the same time; if you enjoyed It Usually Begins, you'll probably like this one as well.”
—Reason, May 2006

“A would-be Hemingway traces the spiritual and sexual odyssey of his early years. In Heretic: Confessions of an ex-Catholic Rebel, Tuccille (Trump, 1985), denounced as a heretic by the dean of a Catholic college, skillfully weaves together details from his Italian-American upbringing in the Bronx with his globetrotting in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The author renounces Catholicism and its educational institutions, “presided over by social misfits, sexual deviants, and intellectual dullards in long, black dresses.” The narrative then adopts a self-deprecating tone, especially when the author decides that he is a born writer. A first novel molders on an agent’s desk for years, yet the optimistic author wanders across North America, Australia, Asia and Europe, drinking copious amounts of alcohol, posing as an accomplished artist, getting into his share of fights and, especially, bedding as many women as possible. Tuccille juxtaposes this narrative of his young adulthood with childhood scenes, invariably filled with guilt, anxiety and strife, thanks in large part to his parents’ loveless marriage. This autobiography claims to recount a spiritual quest, yet it has much more to say about matters of the flesh, often related in spicy detail. Tuccille does mention his journey through atheism, agnosticism, Eastern mysticism, the occult and the radical individualism espoused by Ayn Rand. However, except for the author’s thorough explanation of his initial attraction to Rand’s philosophy and his final rejection of it, details concerning sex and booze dominate the account. Because Tuccille’s style emphasizes telling details and clever turns of phrase, however, the narrative never lags. Generally skillful and engagingly detailed, but accenting the carnal more than the spiritual.”
—Kirkus Reviews