Your Nostalgia is Killing Me

January 10, 2022
Weir (The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket) returns with a searing collection of stories about death from the perspective of a gay man who survived the AIDS epidemic. The unnamed narrator recounts a series of memories from both his childhood and adult life. In “Neorealism at the Infiniplex,” he describes the prolonged death from AIDS in 1994 of his best friend, who became so mean-spirited in his dying days that by the late ’90s, the narrator has forgotten everything he had ever liked about him. “It Gets Worse” covers the narrator’s high school days, when he was relentlessly bullied by the other boys and invisible to the faculty. In “American Graffiti,” he gets high and his best friend abandons him. In “Humoresque,” his quick-witted mother, “a movie star without a movie to star in,” recovers from a brain hemorrhage. The narrator’s savagely funny voice breathes life into the tragic stories, with poignant observations on loneliness and loss (friends stop calling when someone’s on their deathbed because “no one wants to say goodbye twice”) embedded between film references and crackling dialogue. This raw, unflinching work has a lot to offer.

March 15, 2022
Weir's linked collection of bittersweet, often witty stories elucidates almost 50 years in the life of a gay White man in the U.S., from enduring school taunts in 1970s New Jersey to experiencing the horrors of AIDS to that epidemic's continuing reverberations for a scarred (and mostly HIV-positive) generation. The first of the book's three parts, harrowing and sometimes bitingly funny, centers on a narrator who's the caretaker, nursemaid, and faithful sidekick to a friend--not a lover, but a beloved--who's dying. Watching that friend waste away, enduring his hostile outbursts and caustic jokes, indulging his whims: Weir writes powerfully and with nuance about what it's like to grieve someone into the grave and beyond and what it's like to have that grief haunted and needled at and undermined, in a way, by how unpleasant and hateful the beloved became as his health deteriorated. The second section, "Long-Term Survivors," follows this same narrator--his name is John Weir, a stratagem that sometimes seems clever but that can also feel coy--through the next 30 years. Two stories in this section feature his mother. A standout is "Humoresque," in which the narrator, now in his 50s, has come down to Pennsylvania to check on his octogenarian mom, just out of the hospital after a brain bleed she wasn't expected to recover from. She's the kind of person often called indomitable, which (accurately) makes her seem formidable in the way of a battleship or a frosty screen idol; the narrator describes her as "a movie star without a movie to star in." Their impatient, affectionate banter--she's another big personality to be helpmeet to, co-star with, the narrator's preferred (if also resented) role--is lovely and persuasive, and Weir uses it to illuminate what's going on in the narrator's love life; he's here in part, as his perceptive mother intuits, to claim her car so he can drive north to pursue another of his doomed, barely or nonphysical love affairs with another inaccessible man. Sharp, elegiac, angry, funny stories with a searing loneliness often just underneath the surface.

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