On the Boardwalk

A memoir from the writer of BENT with a foreword by Ian McKellen Sherman takes us on a journey through America in the mid twentieth century, starting in New Jersey - where he was born in the 1930s to a Jewish immigrant family - ending on Broadway with the premier of his seminal play Bent starring Richard Gere. On route, we encounter other famous performers including Meryl Streep, Bee Gees, Joan Baez, but the scene-stealing character is always his father - a charismatic narcissist who might have given Trump a run for his money. We stop off in Woodstock, Los Angeles and London - a city Martin would eventually make home; he relays his story with self-deprecating humour as he struggles to make it in theatre, with his sexuality, and under the shadow of the inheritable disease that killed his mother tragically early - a disease from which he finds himself finally free, as he turns forty in the book's closing pages.