I rattled off names of New Narrative writers: Bruce Boone, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Kathy Acker, Gail Scott.
The interviewer asked me to talk about New Narrative, and I told him that it was an avant-garde queer mostly American literary scene circling around community, and especially, memorializing friends and lovers who died of AIDS, refusing their disappearance. The book is inspired by Hervé Guibert’s autoportrait, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, fictionalizing his friends Michel Foucault’s death from AIDS, which also documents Guibert’s own diagnosis, like a French companion to Close to the Knives. The narrator says she loves works that are tender and cruel, and that is what this is for me, a jeremiad, a beautiful complaint. The narrator hotly mourns all of these friends who have dies of AIDS, all named Hervé.
And I chose the Québécois writer Catherine Mavrikakis’s A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning. In a recent interview, I was asked to name a book I thought should be remembered.
