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My Dead Book
My Dead Book is a novel composed of nonlinear vignettes and fragments about a queer man approaching his fiftieth birthday who is haunted by insomnia and his past. In the dead of night, he remembers his friends who died in the late 1980s and 1990s, his years as a teenage throwaway and sex worker, and ruminates on working class survival, queer aging, AIDS, and whether he has outlived his place in the world.
147 pages, Paperback
Published November 9, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
November 27, 2022
My Dead Book is the debut novel by Nate Lippens. The story is told in non-linear fragments - memories of a gay man in middle age who recalls friends and lovers who died in the 1980s during the height of the AIDS crisis. There is a tendency to think of the AIDS crisis as something that happened in the past, without recognizing those among us who still live with scars from that time. Very few works effectively tackle the AIDS epidemic from this perspective and with the level of frankness we see here. It is a reminder that not everyone deals with trauma in the same way. Published in North America by Publication Studio, My Dead Book is the twelfth entry in the Fellow Travelers series. The UK edition is published by Pilot Press, an imprint specializing in queer poetry, fiction, and confessional writing in the shadow of the AIDS crisis.
May 2, 2024
Chaos theory loops in memories rendered fractal through repeated scintillations, slightly aimless at each foggy pass. Movement relies on a single direction guided by memories in a mist of wistfulness and regret. Existential angst and the grinning reaper shake white hands. We are cold but intact. React, slip through the cracks to another windswept cloudy day.
November 19, 2021
Stunning. You'd think a novel about a person thinking about their friends who have died, about their own life on the knife's point, would be depressing, but no. This book is a gem. Yes, there is sadness, grief, pain running through it, but there is also wit, a toughness, a propulsive voice that keeps you reading. I savored this book. I could have read it in one or two sittings, but I loved spending time with this character and his cast of friends. Each small section gleams. Read it. One of the best works of queer literature that I've read in a while.
December 30, 2021
Wow. Easily one of the best books I have read this year - So happy that I picked this up. My Dead Book is candid, powerful, and absolutely entertaining. I read this book in like 2 hours. I wish I could forget & read it again for the first time. Everyone should read this. Looking forward to reading more from the author. VERY good!
March 16, 2023
Shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, UK & Ireland
Did we talk about our families? A little. We were queer and we were out on our own. Not much more to say. It was obvious.
My Dead Book opens: My dead friends are back. I lie in bed at night and see them.
The narrator, a gay man who turns 50 in the course of the novel, reflects, in a series of non-linear vignettes, on his life in the 1980s-1990s, and those of his friends that he lost on the way.
This is a novel that is unflinching in its portrayal of the narrator and his friends's lives - when younger he sleeps with older men for money, there's a scene where he and a friend rob a dead body (after debating whether to urinate on it) - and with many falling pray to drug addiction and suicide as well as HIV, and his doesn't spare himself in his self-appraisal:
I usually say self-taught or that I dropped out after eighth grade and left home. The last time I used autodidact, someone said, “You can suck your own dick?”
“No, but my life provides ample evidence that I know how to fuck myself.”
But there is a strong sense of well of camaraderie, particularly as, like the narrator, so many of those he knows have been rejected by their families due to their sexuality.
Not a book I found it easy to appreciate - but this review and this conversation with the author do the book far more justice:
https://filthydreams.org/2022/05/09/a...
http://southwestreview.com/rememberin...
Did we talk about our families? A little. We were queer and we were out on our own. Not much more to say. It was obvious.
My Dead Book opens: My dead friends are back. I lie in bed at night and see them.
The narrator, a gay man who turns 50 in the course of the novel, reflects, in a series of non-linear vignettes, on his life in the 1980s-1990s, and those of his friends that he lost on the way.
This is a novel that is unflinching in its portrayal of the narrator and his friends's lives - when younger he sleeps with older men for money, there's a scene where he and a friend rob a dead body (after debating whether to urinate on it) - and with many falling pray to drug addiction and suicide as well as HIV, and his doesn't spare himself in his self-appraisal:
I usually say self-taught or that I dropped out after eighth grade and left home. The last time I used autodidact, someone said, “You can suck your own dick?”
“No, but my life provides ample evidence that I know how to fuck myself.”
But there is a strong sense of well of camaraderie, particularly as, like the narrator, so many of those he knows have been rejected by their families due to their sexuality.
Not a book I found it easy to appreciate - but this review and this conversation with the author do the book far more justice:
https://filthydreams.org/2022/05/09/a...
http://southwestreview.com/rememberin...
February 14, 2023
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ — 5/5 Stars. "My Dead Book," A Novel by Nate Lippens, is a dazzling collage of shattered vignettes, busted up and glued back down during a night of insomnia as experienced by a gay man approaching his fiftieth birthday.
As the book’s name implies, this is a story of loss. The narrator recalls all the friends he lost in the chaos of the late 80s and 90s. He remembers their effect on his life in snapshots of conversation. He thinks back on his past as a reckless youth, recalls how he became a sex worker and describes that lifestyle in detail. He comments on the ravaging early years of the AIDS epidemic and questions his current place in the world and where everything has landed in the end.
Sam Pink is the only other writer I can think of who reminds me of Nate Lippens. The writing in this book is tight and sharp as a razor - poetic at times, but not in a flowery way -- poetic in the way the skeletons of old buildings are poetic. Cold but important. A glimpse of foundation. Nate Lippens’ talent shines through as he not only educated me about a time when I was only a child and too young to absorb the truths of the world but also enthralled me with beautiful tales of lives cut too short.
It’s too soon to say, but I am fighting the urge to call this book a masterpiece. Instead, I need to read it a few more times before I place it on that shelf in my heart.
#BookReview #books #booksbooksbooks #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #sampink #transgressive #NateLippens #MyDeadBook
As the book’s name implies, this is a story of loss. The narrator recalls all the friends he lost in the chaos of the late 80s and 90s. He remembers their effect on his life in snapshots of conversation. He thinks back on his past as a reckless youth, recalls how he became a sex worker and describes that lifestyle in detail. He comments on the ravaging early years of the AIDS epidemic and questions his current place in the world and where everything has landed in the end.
Sam Pink is the only other writer I can think of who reminds me of Nate Lippens. The writing in this book is tight and sharp as a razor - poetic at times, but not in a flowery way -- poetic in the way the skeletons of old buildings are poetic. Cold but important. A glimpse of foundation. Nate Lippens’ talent shines through as he not only educated me about a time when I was only a child and too young to absorb the truths of the world but also enthralled me with beautiful tales of lives cut too short.
It’s too soon to say, but I am fighting the urge to call this book a masterpiece. Instead, I need to read it a few more times before I place it on that shelf in my heart.
#BookReview #books #booksbooksbooks #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #sampink #transgressive #NateLippens #MyDeadBook
May 1, 2022
Lippens' book is an evocative death shawl of a story that will stick with me for a long time to come. Though it says "a novel" on the cover, the writing is as intimate, gripping, and detail-heavy as the best memoir. But it feels so personal and nakedly moving, it transcends labels–autofiction, personal essay, diaristic queer nostalgia, fragments, whatever.
Lippens has written an amazing book of one man's survival, life, lusts, and loves, while so many people around him have died. Highly recommended.
Lippens has written an amazing book of one man's survival, life, lusts, and loves, while so many people around him have died. Highly recommended.
January 7, 2022
A book of nonlinear memory fragments describing lost friends from a wild youth spent with a fast crowd (road trips, hustling, drugs... the usual), but not gloomy! The narrator displays both middle-aged detachment and a fair bit of wit. Some parts were a bit opaque for me, but I'm a hopeless literalist.
November 17, 2021
Full Review
Nate Lippens has created a powerful work about mortality, memory, and identity in his first novel. I very much look forward to seeing what he accomplishes in his future work.
Nate Lippens has created a powerful work about mortality, memory, and identity in his first novel. I very much look forward to seeing what he accomplishes in his future work.
February 4, 2023
This fits into a favorite kind of literature for me - introspectively vulnerable and honest examination of what it is to be human and to live a life, with a love for other people that shines through. Here it shines through despite terrible circumstances. Thrown out onto the streets at 15 by his mother for being gay, the narrator survives through sex work and depending on a seemingly pretty wide network of friends for survival. Making the story far harder is that the height of the AIDS epidemic is coming along. Remembrance of who he has lost gives the book its title.
The losses come from the virus and from despair. Characters are introduced early in the book by their deaths, before we come to know more about them later. This was quite effective for me and I found the writing stellar. Here is Shane, who drowned himself:
Though only a few can really feature of course, the narrator knows quite a lot of people. There’s a line in here about “forty moves and over a hundred roommates” that gave this homebody introvert the shudders, imagining it. But this is definitely not just a book about those others. The narrator looks inward and seeks a clear eyed knowledge of himself as well. He finds someone far more ambivalent about himself and about the worth of his own life than he is about all those he knows and their worth (one suspects that many of them are in fact more ambivalent about themselves than they are about our narrator!). He thinks:
This is all told in the vignette style, like Acker or Lockwood or Offil. One particularly powerful vignette here presents the narrator on his 50th birthday. The first line is “I’m in bed reading E.M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born when Rudy calls.” He reflects on all his friends who have reached out to wish him a happy birthday. The last bit goes, “I’m crying, not because I’m sad. Or not just sad. Not because I’m old. Not because it’s a privilege to be alive when many others are gone. I’m crying because I’m remembered. And that’s all there is.” Starting with the anti-natalism of philosopher Emil Cioran, the text ends with gratefulness for human connection. A vignette of his ambivalence in nutshell, yet moving from deep pessimism to an optimism.
One hopes that inasmuch as this is autofiction, Lippens has continued his journey to a similar place. The book’s last line, “I’m alive. Of course, I’m alive” gives hope that this is so.
The losses come from the virus and from despair. Characters are introduced early in the book by their deaths, before we come to know more about them later. This was quite effective for me and I found the writing stellar. Here is Shane, who drowned himself:
Shane and I had been back in contact, but we were not in touch. Whenever I’d heard from him over the last several years, he was texting some version of “I don’t want to be here” from parties, work, restaurants, nightclubs, gallery openings, and holidays. I agreed with him. Most of those sounded horrible. His texts were funny, but I knew he was serious. Accumulated, they showed a man who never wanted to be anywhere, who was looking to leave, then he did.
Though only a few can really feature of course, the narrator knows quite a lot of people. There’s a line in here about “forty moves and over a hundred roommates” that gave this homebody introvert the shudders, imagining it. But this is definitely not just a book about those others. The narrator looks inward and seeks a clear eyed knowledge of himself as well. He finds someone far more ambivalent about himself and about the worth of his own life than he is about all those he knows and their worth (one suspects that many of them are in fact more ambivalent about themselves than they are about our narrator!). He thinks:
We talked about escorting as a positive experience. I said it may have even created my self-esteem. To be an effeminate boy despised and mocked and at sea in his body, then to be adored and paid to bare that body had been powerful. I believed the words as I said them but knew I wouldn’t later.
This is all told in the vignette style, like Acker or Lockwood or Offil. One particularly powerful vignette here presents the narrator on his 50th birthday. The first line is “I’m in bed reading E.M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born when Rudy calls.” He reflects on all his friends who have reached out to wish him a happy birthday. The last bit goes, “I’m crying, not because I’m sad. Or not just sad. Not because I’m old. Not because it’s a privilege to be alive when many others are gone. I’m crying because I’m remembered. And that’s all there is.” Starting with the anti-natalism of philosopher Emil Cioran, the text ends with gratefulness for human connection. A vignette of his ambivalence in nutshell, yet moving from deep pessimism to an optimism.
One hopes that inasmuch as this is autofiction, Lippens has continued his journey to a similar place. The book’s last line, “I’m alive. Of course, I’m alive” gives hope that this is so.
May 6, 2023
Loved My Dead Book @NateLippens @pilotpressldn - a gay man in Wisconsin, approaching 50, suffers insomnia and thinks back to friends, dead ones, his life as a hustler in New York, life on the streets, bars, drinks. Told in pinpoint vignettes, sharp one-liners.
December 28, 2021
Brilliant. Moving. The writing feels effortless but the experience the author lived must have been hard won. One of the best books I've read this season.
September 29, 2022
READING VLOG
This will come off as an insult, but this reminded me a lot of a book that had a chokehold on me as a teenager. Lippens's novel reminds me a lot of Exit Here by Jason Myers. The difference only being that Lippens's novel is a lot more mature and honest in its lyrical voice. I think it's the tone, the ways in which so much angst in a teen can carry you so far and fast into worlds that test your survival.
Short, fast, and full of raw honesty, it's one of those books I would definitely recommend to get someone out of a reading slump.
Such beautiful vignettes of life lost, life gone and far off. It's so lonely to be an example of survival. And it's all under a harsh spotlight lit by the heaven of tyring humor, art mentions, and very real characters.
This will come off as an insult, but this reminded me a lot of a book that had a chokehold on me as a teenager. Lippens's novel reminds me a lot of Exit Here by Jason Myers. The difference only being that Lippens's novel is a lot more mature and honest in its lyrical voice. I think it's the tone, the ways in which so much angst in a teen can carry you so far and fast into worlds that test your survival.
Short, fast, and full of raw honesty, it's one of those books I would definitely recommend to get someone out of a reading slump.
Such beautiful vignettes of life lost, life gone and far off. It's so lonely to be an example of survival. And it's all under a harsh spotlight lit by the heaven of tyring humor, art mentions, and very real characters.
December 22, 2021
What a marvel that Nate Lippens could cram so much life into the short novel My Dead Book. Layers of time collapse into each other, the dead walk through dreams, bodies move through place and space, fucking, surviving, hustling, getting high. Lippen's eye captures voice and image with scalpel wit and unsentimental, blood-beating warmth. Reading MDB was the perfect companion to a long winter night read in a town where a younger me said goodbye to so many friends.
December 31, 2021
Reading Cioran after a few pineapple daiquiris. A glossary of the lost and mythic, Gena Rowlands stood in a Wisconsin hallway. Disappointment as truth, faggots wrapped in gossip for the sub-zero New York winter. Jackie Curtis’s grandmother holding court in an East Village bar. Acid sharp vignettes. A series of red herrings, death as the plot twist we all saw coming. Mottled palimpsest of the living and expired. A séance conducted inside Truman Capote’s bathtub.
February 14, 2024
“I didn't understand the phrase dead and gone. ‘He's been dead and gone over a year,’ people said. It was redundant. But now I understand the slack time between dead and gone. Shane is dead but he isn't yet gone. Others are gone. Some return and go again. Like the living.”
savour this one, y'all
savour this one, y'all
June 24, 2023
It took me much, much longer than anticipated to get through this little book. Not so much because the content was heavy, the narration circulates in and around the AIDS crisis, but because the prose was - with each tendril of exposition stretching out from the page and holding me there. I liked the scene with the infant's cathartic cry at the coiled peak of the Guggenheim.
December 29, 2021
A brilliant meditation on what it means to live when so many around you have died, written in prose as clear and sharp as broken glass. I love this book.
December 19, 2021
My Dead Book is an insomniac’s night of remembrance, forgiving, and love. Nate Lippens has created a perfect recounting of the past and the present with stark truths and tender tribute to friends and lovers alive in memory and heart. I did not want the night nor the book to end, but I know there will be more to come from Nate, and I cannot wait.
Read
August 5, 2023“I wanted Henry to take me home. Not because it would change anything or become anything. It would provide the voice that had woken me with news of the fire speaking to me the next morning, so life wasn't random fragments. An electrical wire ran through it if you knew where to look and could sense tiny powers.”
Really sad. Really beautiful.
Really sad. Really beautiful.
March 5, 2023
3 / 5 stars
It was alright.
It was alright.
August 29, 2022
My father mistook my childhood obsession with Amelia Earhart for an interest in airplanes. He got books from the library, and I sat with him and listened while he talked about the aircraft in the photographs. His eyes were dreamy. He was back in the service. My own interest in Earhart had nothing to do with aircraft. I only cared because of her disappearance and not because I wanted the mystery solved. What had happened to her wasn't my concern. My concern was that she had vanished and stayed gone.
February 5, 2022
A few passages from My Dead Book:
*
Afterward, some friends said his death was tragic and asked why. I said I imagined people killed themselves for reasons as varied as the one’s others used to live.
*
Daylight shows around the edges of my curtains. I forget I haven’t left my apartment in a week. I forget the heaviness of my days given over to make-up sleep and the way nights have become elastic and unreal, hours moving through long-gone decades, old hopes and loves shuffling like flash cards, names and images not quite aligning, and the hour before dawn when the pull to live is not strong. I fight it, flexing my old defiance, saving the day I will sleep through. I can’t let them win, I think. But who is them – someone who has hurt and forgotten me, an imagined foe, powerful people, or is them what it has always been: everyone who isn’t me?
*
This has been enough. Too much really. The generosity of life’s disappointments has been sufficient.
*
Rudy says our ancestors didn’t sleep for eight hours straight. They slept three-to-four-hour periods. He wants me to shake labeling myself an insomniac.
“It’s negative thinking. A negative label.”
“Negativity is my strength. I’m a man of my word and that word is usually no.”
*
“If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you regret most not having told someone?” Rudy says.
“I forgive you.”
“Why haven’t you told them yet?”
“Because I haven’t forgiven them.”
*
I wasn’t looking for community. Community was a group of people figuring out how you didn’t belong.
*
*
Afterward, some friends said his death was tragic and asked why. I said I imagined people killed themselves for reasons as varied as the one’s others used to live.
*
Daylight shows around the edges of my curtains. I forget I haven’t left my apartment in a week. I forget the heaviness of my days given over to make-up sleep and the way nights have become elastic and unreal, hours moving through long-gone decades, old hopes and loves shuffling like flash cards, names and images not quite aligning, and the hour before dawn when the pull to live is not strong. I fight it, flexing my old defiance, saving the day I will sleep through. I can’t let them win, I think. But who is them – someone who has hurt and forgotten me, an imagined foe, powerful people, or is them what it has always been: everyone who isn’t me?
*
This has been enough. Too much really. The generosity of life’s disappointments has been sufficient.
*
Rudy says our ancestors didn’t sleep for eight hours straight. They slept three-to-four-hour periods. He wants me to shake labeling myself an insomniac.
“It’s negative thinking. A negative label.”
“Negativity is my strength. I’m a man of my word and that word is usually no.”
*
“If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you regret most not having told someone?” Rudy says.
“I forgive you.”
“Why haven’t you told them yet?”
“Because I haven’t forgiven them.”
*
I wasn’t looking for community. Community was a group of people figuring out how you didn’t belong.
*
March 27, 2024
Alive and kicking: there are times when Nate Lippens’s poised, mannered debut appears to tip into a series of Oscar Wilde-style pronouncements that borrow from the bons mots of others, such as Capote’s “I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m a homosexual. I’m a genius.” To which the interlocutor replies, “well, three out of four ain’t bad”. This might be a handicap - an assemblage of other people’s thoughts and feelings - but Lippens steers his course expertly against a backdrop of an aging queer man growing old and growing up when he expected to do neither. “Opinions are not like assholes,” says the narrator’s friend Paul, in one of a series of aphorisms. “I rarely find opinions pleasurable.” Paul is, of course, dead, as are most of those who populate this book. The underlying grief makes sense of a self-dramatising narrative - it’s survival, after all. “Rudy ends our night quoting Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. ‘Now, Mary, you’ve delighted us quite enough for one evening.’” Which is all we need to hear.
November 10, 2022
I saw the cover of this book at the book fair, decided to wait for five minutes to get it and once I returned, it was gone. I then proceeded to the book store and got it. Sometimes you know you are in for a treat just by seeing the cover of something.
This was a beautiful, rough and deliciously fragmentary book that dealt with life and death and drugs and FILMS and aging, in a gay community of a small town, years back. I loved the setting and feel a deep connection with all communities that exist on the outskirts of society. These are very beautiful people to me.
I loved the structure and the combination of deep, heart-breaking subjects and raunchy humor.
Reminded my a bit of Scott McClanahan, Jenny Offill and Ocean Vuong, though stood bravely on its own feet.
And I simply adored the ramblings of TV series and films and art. This is a brain that functions in the same way I do.
To me there is nothing better than books like this.
This was a beautiful, rough and deliciously fragmentary book that dealt with life and death and drugs and FILMS and aging, in a gay community of a small town, years back. I loved the setting and feel a deep connection with all communities that exist on the outskirts of society. These are very beautiful people to me.
I loved the structure and the combination of deep, heart-breaking subjects and raunchy humor.
Reminded my a bit of Scott McClanahan, Jenny Offill and Ocean Vuong, though stood bravely on its own feet.
And I simply adored the ramblings of TV series and films and art. This is a brain that functions in the same way I do.
To me there is nothing better than books like this.
February 5, 2023
(As an aside: I know Nate but nowhere near well enough for this to weigh on my review.)
This is tremendous. Spare without being vague; pulpy without being purple; sad without being maudlin; both witty and moving, often on the same page.
For a book that’s already an afternoon read, the real feat here are the flashes. Each chapter is made of interwoven vignettes, none longer than a page and a half. The true gems are sections that are 50, 25, sometimes 15 words. Marvelous work.
A heavy recommendation for anybody who remains haunted but doesn’t believe in ghosts, who knows the restlessness of insomnia, or who can also recall production lore about the Misfits and Paris, Texas.
This is tremendous. Spare without being vague; pulpy without being purple; sad without being maudlin; both witty and moving, often on the same page.
For a book that’s already an afternoon read, the real feat here are the flashes. Each chapter is made of interwoven vignettes, none longer than a page and a half. The true gems are sections that are 50, 25, sometimes 15 words. Marvelous work.
A heavy recommendation for anybody who remains haunted but doesn’t believe in ghosts, who knows the restlessness of insomnia, or who can also recall production lore about the Misfits and Paris, Texas.
February 4, 2023
If you know me & my reading habits at all you know that I rarely give five stars.
The literacy legacy this book has is unimaginable - every single word is worth fifty, it’s razor sharp, painfully bitter but above all in writing about grief for complex relationships Nate Lippens rewrites the common grief life cycle away from linear denial to acceptance which is refreshing. The central relationship, the readers’ reminder this protagonist is capable of love and loving, is heart wrenching.
I’m on such a male anguish train right now - and this book was just *chefs kiss*
The literacy legacy this book has is unimaginable - every single word is worth fifty, it’s razor sharp, painfully bitter but above all in writing about grief for complex relationships Nate Lippens rewrites the common grief life cycle away from linear denial to acceptance which is refreshing. The central relationship, the readers’ reminder this protagonist is capable of love and loving, is heart wrenching.
I’m on such a male anguish train right now - and this book was just *chefs kiss*
June 23, 2022
Flawlessly accurate even while being in dreams and echoes of lives gone by. Distilled and rarefied each passage can sit on its own as a postcard to be revisted. From the book. "I'm awake in a floaty half-state. A pageant of bad decisions takes the stage. I like in bed tabulating my crimes and regrets on some imagined yet powerful abacus. I number the dead friends and the living friends and think where I should be filed. Where I fit. Neither column."
February 21, 2024
A contemporary tragedy of youth left to fend for themselves because of familial rejection or their own indifference. A ghost story related by the observant narrator whose own life spirals with a drug-induced fear of living , but manages to survive in spite of his own best efforts otherwise. The writing is Exact-o knife precise with its sharp edges and economical use of language to convey the desperation of youth set adrift by modern society.
A compelling read that I highly recommend.
A compelling read that I highly recommend.
April 3, 2022
A perfect book, and precisely what I needed to read just now. Striking, swift, funny, moving. Sleek prose as likely to deliver a belly laugh as a body blow. No excesses of any kind, every word precise and affecting. This is impressive writing, so good that I rationed this short book to myself to extend its reading.
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