Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
Categories
Memoirs

ALLIGATOR TEARS

Edgar Gomez

A darkly comic memoir-in-essays about the scam of the American Dream, healing through community, and doing whatever it takes to survive in the Sunshine State - from the award-winning author of High-Risk Homosexual

In Florida, one of the first lessons you're taught in kindergarten is that if you're ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to run in zigzags. It's a strategy that has guided much of Edgar Gomez's life. Like the night his mother had a stroke while he and his brother stood at the foot of her bed, wondering whether to face an astronomical ambulance bill or risk waiting it out. Zig. To help him fit in, his mom buys him veneers on credit just before declaring bankruptcy. To put himself through college, he clocked in for shift after shift at the mall, putting sandals on tourists' smelly, swollen feet for minimum wage at the Flip Flop Shop. Zag. His crew of working-class, Latinx queer friends would change out of their uniforms in the passenger seats of each other's cars, speeding towards the relief they found under the bright lights of the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. Those days he paid his phone bill by giving massages to men he met online, back when he and his friends Venmo'd each other the same emergency $20 over and over. Zig. Zag. Gomez survived this way as long as his legs would carry him. Alligator Tears is a memoir-in-essays charting Gomez's lifelong obsession with clawing his family out of poverty by any means possible, and learning to see the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach. Gomez's story is a testament to achieving success on your own terms, letting go of humility, and smiling wide with all your fake teeth. Edgar Gomez is the author of High-Risk Homosexual, which received an American Book Award, a Stonewall Israel-Fishman Nonfiction Book Honor Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir. A graduate of the University of California at Riverside's MFA program, he has written for the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, LitHub, and New York Magazine. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Black Mountain Institute. Gomez lives between New York and Puerto Rico.

Available products
Book Published 2025-02-11 by Crown

Comments

Gomez is sweet and conversational, like a friend readers have known for life: nostalgic, playful, and caring. . . . It is beautiful to get to know the life of this artist, whose endearing world will remain with readers long after they've finished the book.

At its core, this memoir in essays is a Florida book, an ode to a state composed of immigrants and their children, a tourist destination reliant on the labor of those often considered "other." Humorous, heartfelt, and refreshingly sincere, Alligator Tears is a meta-level how-to guide for putting words down on the page when the world would rather you not, and a raw and energetic account of coming of age as a queer Latino man on the periphery of the happiest place on Earth.

Through honest writing, Edgar Gomez beautifully depicts the importance of creating and having a queer community. At times funny, at others crucially poignant, Alligator Tears establishes Gomez as a voice of their generation.

Alligator Tears is gorgeous, poignant, and raw, chock full of hope and want and irrepressible, aching beauty. This is the kind of Florida writing that I love most; a daring, swampy slick of a collection where the humidity hangs like a hug. Edgar Gomez is a tremendous talent. I'll read anything he writes.

Relatable, funny and deeply heartfelt, this memoir is one not to miss.

Meticulously evoked and darkly comic. . . . Heartening. . . . This portrait of the artist as a young flip-flop salesman will inspire, amuse, and empower its audience.

No one writes about the terrors of late-stage capitalism with such humor, candor, and aplomb. In every sentence, Gomez elucidates the unnecessary horrors of suffering in the American context. To our benefit (and relief), he accomplishes this feat with the wonder of a child and the wit of a satirist. Affecting and inspiring, Alligator Tears is more proof that Gomez is a writer who deserves our attention.

Edgar Gomez is a young writer of deep talent and enormous grace. Alligator Tears speaks for the lost tribes of "other," those who serve our food, do our taxes, and mind our children. They walk the earth among us, invisible, without a voice. I am so glad that Edgar Gomez has given them one.

With tender vulnerability and laugh-out-loud humor, Alligator Tears invites readers into the lives of America's invisible caste: the working-class immigrants who are knocked down by systemic barrier after systemic barrier, but who each day rise with pride to claim our right to exist. This book was a balm for the hunger and fear in my inner child, the loneliness and frustration in my adult self. I laughed; I cried; I read and re-read beautiful wisdom that I will never forget. Edgar Gomez's voice is one for us all.