Let’s face it. Short story collections often make for a choppy reading experience. Even the best of them are a challenge to read from cover to cover. Two magnificent exceptions are Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio and Patrick Ryan’s The Dream Life of Astronauts. These two short story collections are linked by place: in Mr. Anderson’s book, it’s a small midwestern town, in Mr. Ryan’s , it’s Florida. Something more visceral links the stories in John Weir’s new collection, Your Nostalgia is Killing Me. For much of the book, it’s the narrator’s relationship with a man named David. We never learn his last name, but he bares a striking resemblance to the great queer writer, David Feinberg. (Full disclosure QueerReader knew and loved David Feinberg before and after the success of his novel, Eighty-Sixed.) We first meet David engaging in performative acts–publicly emphasizing the simple fact that he is dying. For the rest of the book, he lingers on in spirit and even as an intrusive ghost as Mr. Weir explores the relationships that follow–and how the AIDS crisis has impacted a generation of queers. The result is a book of stories which is compelling and surprisingly hard to put down.
Humor is a tricky thing in American fiction. The British are more receptive to it, perhaps because they’re more comfortable with irony. For this Queer Reader, the problem with humor in fiction is quite simply, when it misses the mark it can be just awful. There’s nothing worse than an author trying to be funny and not achieving it. But Mr. Weir never tries to be funny. The humor in this book derives from the simple truths he reveals and–it must be said–a queer sensibility that is all his own.
The book begins with the death of David and hints of the truth-telling simplicity that defines this book:
I had planned to be sad about it, but it turned out I was relieved. I’m not proud of this. In my fantasy, he would have died in my arms, and the screen would have faded to black, like in a movie. It was an Italian neorealist ending, a grim death, but a noble one, suffered in a time of war or shortly after the war. What happened instead was that he was so mean for the last three months of his life that I stopped liking him. Not just at that time, but for all time, both in the season of his death and retroactively, forever. His dying wasted our five years of friendship, and I lost him in retrospect. I don’t remember what I liked about him.
In this first short story, “Neorealism at the Infiniplex” the narrator contends with David’s parents who insist on a Rabbi for the memorial. At the last minute he somehow finds one on a Friday evening in New York. This despite the fact that David “hated God”. The narrator puts up with David’s parents who didn’t show up at all for David’s dying. And then, when it’s all over, he goes to the movies to see Saving Private Ryan. Appropriately, the humor in this story derives from it’s realism. This story feels true.
The next story in this collection, “American Graffiti” is, in this Queer Reader’s opinion, the best. It’s beautifully constructed, funny and just a little heartbreaking It’s the story of a queer teenager’s friendship with a local girl. The humor in this story comes from the author’s emotional distance from the Northeast Jersey town he aspires to get out of. The poignancy derives from the fact that he’s leaving his friend behind. It’s a classic story–the kind that should be taught in schools for years to come.
AIDS activism looms large in this book. And it’s about time. More than twenty-five years have past since the “cocktail” seemingly put an end to the AIDS crisis in New York. That means that an entire generation of queers have no memory of a time when demonstrations, zaps, and even getting arrested were an everyday part of life. A time when it wasn’t at all unusual to bump into an old acquaintance who had lost so much weight it was difficult to recognize him. Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show and David France’s How to Survive a Plague help, but it’s only great fiction that can bring that horrible period back to life. In Your Nostalgia is Killing Me John Weir achieves this and more.
Needless to say, QueerReader strongly recommends this important historical book.
John Weir’s Your Nostalgia is Killing Me is published by Red Hen Press.
06/26/22