PublishedNew York Review Books, February 2024 |
ISBN9781681377766 |
FormatSoftcover, 256 pages |
Dimensions21.6cm × 14.6cm |
"I was a writer, but not the writer I needed to be. For that I had to become a different person," Robert Gl ck, widely acclaimed as a novelist and as a theorist of "the new narrative," recently told the Paris Review, in which a section of About Ed has appeared.
About Ed is Gl ck's portrait of the artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai, his sometime lover, met in the seventies in San Francisco, when gay life emerged unabashedly from the closet. "I wanted to find in Ed something to latch on to that was outside my egotism and fear, my threadbare relation to the world-a leap through Ed into lyric time," Gl ck has said, and in this book that is both "a novel and my version of an AIDS memoir" he wanted to capture the full range of his feelings for Ed- "estranged from Ed, bored by him, moved by him."
It is a book about the life they lived together-art and writing and family and sex and death-and, composed over many decades, it is also a book about how the past continues to change in memory and to charge the present. "What is the right question to ask about a life?" Gl ck asks, describing About Ed as a "collaborative project," since "Ed helped me write this book." Ed gave him "notes to fashion a chapter about the day he was diagnosed so I could describe his experience from the inside," and "after Ed died, Daniel, Ed's partner, lent me Ed's dream journals. . . . He started writing them in 1970, the year that we met. We both used his journals, not as puzzles to solve the truth of a self but as a commons producing images that we harvested for paintings and poems. And fifty years later, there I was reading and copying out and running away from his dreams. Are they a condensed version of Ed? Shorthand? Distillation? Is he knowable and unknowable in the same degree sleeping or waking?"
About Ed is a challenging and beautiful book by one of America's finest and most adventurous writers.
A moving story about love, AIDS, grief, and memory by one of the most adventurous writers to come out of San Francisco's LGBTQ+ scene.
Bob Gl ck met Ed Aulerich-Sugai in 1970. Ed was an aspiring artist; Bob wanted to write. They were young men in San Francisco at the high tide of sexual liberation and soon, and for eight years, they were lovers, after which they were friends. Ed was an explorer in the realms of sex. He was beautiful, fragile, exasperating, serious, unassuaged. In 1994 he died of HIV. His dream notebooks became a touchstone for this book, which Gl ck has been working on for some two decades, while also making his name as a proponent of New Narrative writing and as one of America's most unusual, venturesome, and lyrical authors. About Ed is about Ed, who remains, as our dead do, both familiar and unknowable, faraway and close. It is about Bob too.
The book is a hybrid, at once fiction and fact, like memory, and it takes in many things through tales of political activism and domestic comedy and fury to questions of art and love and experiences of longing and horror. The book also shifts in register, from the delicate to the analytic, to funny and explicit and heartbroken. It begins in the San Francisco of the early 1980s, when Ed and Bob have been broken up for a while. aIds is spreading, but Ed has yet to receive his diagnosis. It follows him backward through his life with Bob in the 1970s and forward through the harrowing particulars of death. It holds on to him and explores his art. It ends in his dreams.
