In Closest Thing to Heaven: A Memoir, Michael DaQueen opens the curtain on the messy, magnificent, and utterly magnetic first three years of her life in New York City. This is not a polished fairy tale of instant stardom but a confessional scrapbook of heartbreaks, drag shows, and late-night subway rides, written with the rhythm of a queen who’s equal parts performer and poet. DaQueen, a self-proclaimed hopeless romantic and proud West Coast transplant, invites readers to walk beside her through the glitter-streaked chaos of becoming an artist in a city that both seduces and devours. It’s a book that doesn’t just tell a story, it dances, lip-syncs, and sometimes limps through one.
From her earliest memories of sitting beside her mother as Sex and the City played on television, little Michael dreamed of Manhattan’s magic. The skyline was her fairy godmother; the flashing lights of Broadway were her birthright. Yet before she ever set foot on those fabled streets, she was cutting her teeth in the suburbs of Los Angeles, hosting drag shows in neighborhood bars where regulars cheered from barstools and queens borrowed wigs from one another. The pandemic shut that world down, but it also cracked open the possibility of something new. When her local bar announced it wasn’t reopening, she felt a tug, part grief, part destiny. She packed up her life, said goodbye to California, and landed in New York in the spring of 2021, with a suitcase full of sequins and a heart still healing from a breakup.
