A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom is a modern, jazzy bildungsroman that uses everything from personal memoir, a fugue-like structure, poetry, images, lyrics, and diaries to paint a vivid, eloquent and human portrait of gay, black, Jessie Vincent Grandier and the striving African American middle class that spawned him in the late 1950s.

Born to a high-yellow, upper-crust New Orleans Creole mother and a lowborn, Louisiana bayou-bred, military father, Jessie steadfastly battles to reconcile his existence with expectations and preconceptions of those around him -- black and white. He shoulders the weight of his black bourgeois family’s hopes through the ‘60s and ‘70s, his mother’s death, and the resulting familial melodrama that tears him and his family apart. If not broken, then seemingly irreparably bent, he wends his way through Harvard in the ‘70s and drinks his way through the Reagan ‘80s in gay bars from the LA barrio to Beverly Hills. When Jessie’s grandiose ambitions have abandoned him when he’s almost beaten, and when it’s a breath away from too late, he looks back, regards the jagged shards of his life and pieces them into a remarkable whole.

The post-modern writing careens from pure ribaldry, to brutal honesty, to deeply tender, to “gonzoesque,” but at the intelligent heart of the novel is the internal struggle of dislocation, and the deconstruction of an African-American family. It is a completely unique look at race, sex, and finding redemption the hard way.

Leonce Gaiter is the author of "A Memory of Fictions (or) Just - Tiddy-Boom," the thriller, "I am the Whore and the Holy One," the historical novel, "I Dreamt I Was in Heaven - The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang," the coming of age novel, "In the Company of Educated Men," and the noir thriller, "Bourbon Street." His non-fiction work includes, "Whites Shackled Themselves to Race, and Blacks Have Yet to Free Ourselves." Other nonfiction pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Times, LA Weekly, NY Newsday, The Washington Post, Salon, and in national syndication.

Raised in New Orleans, Washington D.C., Germany, Missouri, Maryland and elsewhere, Leonce Gaiter was the quintessential rootless army brat. He began writing in grade school and continued the habit through his graduation from Harvard. After studying film and English literature, he moved to Los Angeles and worked in the creative and business ends of the film and music industries for several years. Leaving Los Angeles, he subsequently stumbled into B2B marketing for major high tech firms.

What I like to write:

In fiction, I like to write about the extraordinary. I have little interest in domestic drama, in small tales of internal struggle. I want to read and write characters who are larger than life. I certainly don't want to read or write about people who are "just like me." I'm fascinated by those infinitely grander than I will ever be, willing to risk more, grasp more, love more, hate more, whose time and place demands more than you or I can probably imagine having to give... I guess it's my Southern Gothic roots. In non-fiction, I focus on the perceptions of "race" and their vast ramifications.