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My Dead Book

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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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Nate Lippens

6 books38 followers

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 79 reviews
Profile Image for David.
301 reviews1,436 followers
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.
Profile Image for Janie.
1,172 reviews
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.
Profile Image for Henk.
1,195 reviews301 followers
June 3, 2025
Fragments from the mind of a gay man almost turning 50, mourning his friends, dead or domesticated, and life in general. Bleak and brutal at times, queerness and existential loneliness is core to this slim but impactful book
I think constantly about how my desire was tied to death and how much I believed I wouldn’t live to be forty.

In My Dead Book the narrator, living in Wisconsin on his own, turns 50. He remembers his dead friends and episodes in his life following his expulsion from his familial home at 15. From sex work, stealing from a dead man on the streets, drugs and overdoses to AIDS funerals, the subject of the book is almost without pause bleak.
I realise I am both very bourgeois and fortunate to have been born in 1990. Nate Lippens his writing is effective and features some nice witticisms like: Try boxing. It offers all the pleasure of being hit in the face without the hassle of a relationship.

I was reminded a bit of the final chapters of A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham, with the lake and loneliness, and remorse and regrets featuring prominently in both works. For something so short this is an impactful and introspective read that packs rage and sadness beneath its at times stylised surface of sentences.

Quotes:
Walking in the church was like stepping into someone’s rape fantasy with no safe word. We played along, bowing our heads and listening as people spoke gibberish.

Then he had an open relationship they ran like a business: a right of first refusal.
Marshall followed Oscar Wilde’s dictum that moderation is a fatal thing, and nothing succeeds like excess. He didn’t succeed but he did exceed.

Suicide was something I kept as an option - my retirement plan maybe - but I envisioned it as a solo flight.

I believe everyone is deeply damaged. It’s the human condition. Some people just don’t know they’re deeply damaged. Poor dears, they think they’re normal. Imagine being that damaged.

I won’t play the fool to be loved anymore, so I won’t be loved.

We drank ourselves silly, then we drank ourselves sad.

Both of us have returned to our home states after decades away in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin.

My friends and former friends and acquaintances expand frantic energy to be worthy. I know I’m unworthy. And irrelevant. Not fading but already faded, turning into a stripe of light above my bed as my friend continues to give me a pep talk of platitudes, to wear me down until I say everything will be fine and change the subject to his home renovations and upcoming trip to Rome.

I never know which is worse, the things that don’t happen or the things that do.

Turning tricks wasn’t so bad. I was treated like an object, but I was an object with money.

He was like a beloved regional college - small but well-endowed.

Sometimes I felt I’d escaped and sometimes I felt I’d been banished.

When I hear the word community, I think of the stoning scene in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. I wasn’t looking for community. Community was a group of people figuring out how you don’t belong.

And the voice that said again and again I had outlived myself.
Profile Image for RP.
186 reviews
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.
Profile Image for Reid Anderson.
21 reviews69 followers
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!
Profile Image for Paul Fulcher.
Author 2 books1,953 followers
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...
Profile Image for Kevin.
Author 35 books35.4k followers
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.
Profile Image for Alvin.
Author 8 books141 followers
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.
Profile Image for Ben Arzate.
Author 35 books134 followers
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.
Profile Image for Lee.
547 reviews64 followers
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:
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.
Profile Image for Matthew Kinlin.
Author 12 books45 followers
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.
46 reviews1 follower
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.
Profile Image for Courtney Maum.
Author 13 books678 followers
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.
Profile Image for Marc.
988 reviews136 followers
June 6, 2025
GR ate my review. I read this one because it was shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, UK & Ireland.

I don't have the heart to rewrite the whole thing, so I'll try to capture the salient points and be uncharacteristically concise...

Lippens catalogues the relationships and deaths fringe gay male life entailed in the '80s and '90s (of the 1900s, children). His soon-to-turn 50 narrator is an exception (age-wise) amongst a population decimated by the AIDS epidemic. It's a brutal read that is both touching and kaleidoscopically disassociative in its point of view. And it's quite funny given the wry, dark humor voiced throughout (from advice to memories to quips). Addiction, desire, survival, and love leave a trail of bodies captured with a kind of undercurrent of manic love in this narrative.

Enjoy a few choice quotes and don't take your life for granted...

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"I believe everyone is deeply damaged. It’s the human condition. Some people just don’t know they’re deeply damaged. Poor dears, they think they’re normal. Imagine being that damaged."
--------------
"When I hear the word community, I think of the stoning scene in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. I wasn’t looking for community. Community was a group of people figuring out how you don’t belong."
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"After Frank died, a friend of his said, 'Tragic—all the misspellings in his suicide note.' ”
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"I have forgotten so much that it resembles forgiveness."
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"Sometimes I forget my Midwestern translations: “You do what you think is best” means “It won’t work but go ahead and waste your time.” "
Profile Image for nathan.
686 reviews1,322 followers
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.
Profile Image for Cooper Lee Bombardier.
Author 19 books75 followers
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.
Profile Image for jame✨.
195 reviews23 followers
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
Profile Image for Jesse.
510 reviews639 followers
November 19, 2025
Much like my experience with the writing of Eileen Myles, who penned the introduction to my Semiotexte edition of this short novel, I just can't pinpoint why this didn't quite work for me en toto. Upon the last page I felt like I was left holding these gorgeous handfuls of textual fragments that I wasn't quite sure what to do with, even as I recognize that reckoning with the very impossibility of coherence & congruity of memory is central to Lippens' project.

That said I did it compulsively readable—its the first time in years I read an entire novel in one sitting—& often felt scorched by its blinding insights, gallows humor, heart-wrenching anecdotes. A special book, even if, alas, we somehow didn't quite sync.

"It's true. The world treats everyone terrible, whatever the world is. But what have any of us ever done for the world, except show up and expect to collect our inheritance for being born?"
Profile Image for Chiara Moioli.
12 reviews
May 18, 2025
“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.’”
Profile Image for Reed.
48 reviews
September 30, 2025
A coming of age novel except the age is 50 and you’re gay and all your friends are dead but you also never got to be 16 so it’s also that

Could probably have been really good but there wasn’t a plot to keep me #LockedIn and I had trouble feeling any strong emotions with the disjointed stories. Ultimately a very vibe based novel and I suppose I was just not vibing that same way which is unfortunate because I was really expecting to like this
Profile Image for ea.
121 reviews3 followers
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.
Profile Image for Jennifer.
Author 4 books27 followers
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.
Profile Image for Tuana.
3 reviews
June 7, 2025
This book was nothing like I expected. It opens with stories of death, heavy and right in your face, but then quietly turns inward, showing the turmoil beneath. It’s not just a memoir of people lost; it’s something lonely with what’s left behind in the narrator himself.

The author writes like someone who’s lived too much and still can’t believe he’s here to tell us about it. The writing is sharp, full of things left unsaid—grief, memory, self-loathing, dark humor, the occasional hope that flickers and dies before the reader can take hold. I kept wanting to shout at him- hold on, it gets better.. But sometimes, maybe, that kind of help is impossible. Sometimes a soul can’t believe in the future because it’s been buried under too much of the past.

Was this book for me? Not really. But I still found something in it, especially in the ending. It felt final, but not complete. Like a story paused mid-sentence. Everything said, and still something missing. That unsettled me in a weird but good way. There’s beauty in the silence that comes after.
Profile Image for Darlene.
1 review1 follower
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.
48 reviews2 followers
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.
Profile Image for Cleo.
175 reviews9 followers
November 8, 2024
Made me cry at 7:30 am today.
Profile Image for Emily Price.
17 reviews
April 14, 2025
Too fragmented for my taste, I found it hard to follow because it skipped around so much.
Profile Image for DaniPhantom.
1,477 reviews15 followers
July 8, 2025
Haunting is what I would describe this as, a bleak reality of what it’s like growing old as a gay person.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 79 reviews

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