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Your Nostalgia is Killing Me
John Weir, author of The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, a defining novel of 1980s New York in its response to the global AIDS crisis, has written a story collection that chronicles the long aftermath of epidemic death, as recorded in the tragicomic voice of a gay man who survived high school in the 1970s, the AIDS death of his best friend in the 1990s, and his complicated relationship with his mother, “a movie star without a movie to star in,” whose life is winding to a close in a retirement community where she lives alone with her last dog.
224 pages, Paperback
Published April 22, 2022
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273 people want to read
About the author
John Weir
3 books13 followersJohn Weir (born 8 February 1959 in Tarrytown, New York) is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket (HarperCollins, 1989), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction at the 2nd Lambda Literary Awards in 1990, and for which he received an NEA Fellowship in Fiction in 1991; and What I Did Wrong (Viking, 2006).
In the early 1990s, he was a Contributing Editor at Details; and he has published nonfiction in The New York Times, Spin, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. His short fiction has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, and elsewhere.
In 1991, in conjunction with ACT UP New York's Day of Desperation action to draw attention to government and media neglect of the global AIDS crisis, Weir and several fellow activists interrupted The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.
Weir is associate professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, where he has taught English and Creative Writing since 1993, and where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation.
His story collection Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me won the 2020 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and was published by Red Hen Press in 2022.
In the early 1990s, he was a Contributing Editor at Details; and he has published nonfiction in The New York Times, Spin, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. His short fiction has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, and elsewhere.
In 1991, in conjunction with ACT UP New York's Day of Desperation action to draw attention to government and media neglect of the global AIDS crisis, Weir and several fellow activists interrupted The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.
Weir is associate professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, where he has taught English and Creative Writing since 1993, and where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation.
His story collection Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me won the 2020 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and was published by Red Hen Press in 2022.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
May 26, 2022
LONG-TERM SURVIVOR
On the day that I purchased Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me: Linked Stories by John Weir at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, I had lunch with a friend during which we extensively talked about what he termed “the AIDS era” that we both had managed to survive but so many of our friends and lovers had not. We agreed that the enormous losses of the 1980s and 1990s can never be underestimated and that the scarring trauma that was the legacy of those decades will live forever with us. After lunch, I went home and started reading Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me.
In Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, an at first unnamed narrator unflinchingly portrays the AIDS era, to use my friend’s words. The narrator begins the first story, “Neorealism at the Infiniplex” with the following sentences: “My friend Dave died of AIDS in the fall of 1994. I had planned to be sad about it, but it turned out I was relieved. I’m not proud of this.” Dave is undoubtedly based on David B. Feinberg, the AIDS activist and author of two novels, Eighty-Sixed (1989) and Spontaneous Combustion (1991), and a collection of essays, Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (1994), in which Feinberg mentions John Weir several times as “my best friend in the entire world.” Feinberg was lost to AIDS in 1994. In Taking Liberties: Gay Men’s Essays on Politics, Culture, and Sex (1996), Michael Bronski includes an essay by John Weir, “Rage, Rage,” in which Weir writes about his relationship with Feinberg. In a later story in Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, the narrator does tell the reader that his name is John Weir.
I devoured Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me in two intense reading sessions. I personally related to a lot of what the narrator, well, narrates. He concludes the intense first story by saying, “He wants them to know what it’s like to have the worst thing happen, to lose everything and never discuss it, so that you live it twice, both in the moment, when it actually goes, and afterward, in the official record of history. So two things are gone. Dave is gone and you’re gone. And maybe you get a moment to say for what, now, you will never be able to tell: that all the people you loved for a season had died, and that you, for years and years after, quite simply, had not.” When I read this, my memory, my own “nostalgia,” took me back twenty-six years to my partner’s funeral service at which I had agreed not to bear witness in my eulogy to the nature of our relationship. I experienced in real life what Judith Butler calls “the delegitimization of relationships.” I digress.
After reading the first story, I paused, took a deep breath, turned the page, and began the second story, “American Graffiti,” which is about, what else? the narrator’s high school years. (Weir assigns movie titles to several of his stories, such as this story, and the stories titled “Scenes from a Marriage” and “Humoresque.” He also weaves many movie references throughout his stories.) What gay man cannot identify with the narrator when he says in this story, “I’m the high school homo”? He prefers to be with the girls, who “were the real boys, lying, fearless, obscene, and indestructible.” Throughout the stories in Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, the narrator says a lot about masculinity in America.
Weir alternates stories about Dave dying of AIDS with stories about growing up gay and stories about his complicated romantic relationships. This sentence from the story titled “Katherine Mansfield” is priceless: “I was getting dumped with my own words by a guy who was quoting a song by the guy I dumped in order to be with the guy who was dumping me.” I double-checked to be sure I correctly transcribed this quotation.
In “Humoresque,” the narrator puts it out there: “’Long-term’ = Not dead yet. ‘Survivor’ = My friends died and I didn’t. Or: I should have died and didn’t.” The narrator gets a lot off his chest in these stories. I assume Weir’s use of the word “nostalgia” is ironic. The anger he expresses is not as all-consuming as Dave’s. At times, the narrator made me laugh out loud. And the stunning final paragraph of the last story, “It Gets Worse,” will resonate with me for a long time.
I am definitely going to re-read John Weir’s two novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket (1989) and What I Did Wrong (2006), both recently reissued by Fordham University Press. John Weir takes his time between books. I’m glad he has given us Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me.
On the day that I purchased Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me: Linked Stories by John Weir at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, I had lunch with a friend during which we extensively talked about what he termed “the AIDS era” that we both had managed to survive but so many of our friends and lovers had not. We agreed that the enormous losses of the 1980s and 1990s can never be underestimated and that the scarring trauma that was the legacy of those decades will live forever with us. After lunch, I went home and started reading Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me.
In Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, an at first unnamed narrator unflinchingly portrays the AIDS era, to use my friend’s words. The narrator begins the first story, “Neorealism at the Infiniplex” with the following sentences: “My friend Dave died of AIDS in the fall of 1994. I had planned to be sad about it, but it turned out I was relieved. I’m not proud of this.” Dave is undoubtedly based on David B. Feinberg, the AIDS activist and author of two novels, Eighty-Sixed (1989) and Spontaneous Combustion (1991), and a collection of essays, Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (1994), in which Feinberg mentions John Weir several times as “my best friend in the entire world.” Feinberg was lost to AIDS in 1994. In Taking Liberties: Gay Men’s Essays on Politics, Culture, and Sex (1996), Michael Bronski includes an essay by John Weir, “Rage, Rage,” in which Weir writes about his relationship with Feinberg. In a later story in Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, the narrator does tell the reader that his name is John Weir.
I devoured Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me in two intense reading sessions. I personally related to a lot of what the narrator, well, narrates. He concludes the intense first story by saying, “He wants them to know what it’s like to have the worst thing happen, to lose everything and never discuss it, so that you live it twice, both in the moment, when it actually goes, and afterward, in the official record of history. So two things are gone. Dave is gone and you’re gone. And maybe you get a moment to say for what, now, you will never be able to tell: that all the people you loved for a season had died, and that you, for years and years after, quite simply, had not.” When I read this, my memory, my own “nostalgia,” took me back twenty-six years to my partner’s funeral service at which I had agreed not to bear witness in my eulogy to the nature of our relationship. I experienced in real life what Judith Butler calls “the delegitimization of relationships.” I digress.
After reading the first story, I paused, took a deep breath, turned the page, and began the second story, “American Graffiti,” which is about, what else? the narrator’s high school years. (Weir assigns movie titles to several of his stories, such as this story, and the stories titled “Scenes from a Marriage” and “Humoresque.” He also weaves many movie references throughout his stories.) What gay man cannot identify with the narrator when he says in this story, “I’m the high school homo”? He prefers to be with the girls, who “were the real boys, lying, fearless, obscene, and indestructible.” Throughout the stories in Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, the narrator says a lot about masculinity in America.
Weir alternates stories about Dave dying of AIDS with stories about growing up gay and stories about his complicated romantic relationships. This sentence from the story titled “Katherine Mansfield” is priceless: “I was getting dumped with my own words by a guy who was quoting a song by the guy I dumped in order to be with the guy who was dumping me.” I double-checked to be sure I correctly transcribed this quotation.
In “Humoresque,” the narrator puts it out there: “’Long-term’ = Not dead yet. ‘Survivor’ = My friends died and I didn’t. Or: I should have died and didn’t.” The narrator gets a lot off his chest in these stories. I assume Weir’s use of the word “nostalgia” is ironic. The anger he expresses is not as all-consuming as Dave’s. At times, the narrator made me laugh out loud. And the stunning final paragraph of the last story, “It Gets Worse,” will resonate with me for a long time.
I am definitely going to re-read John Weir’s two novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket (1989) and What I Did Wrong (2006), both recently reissued by Fordham University Press. John Weir takes his time between books. I’m glad he has given us Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me.
February 23, 2022
Moving memoir written with poetic prose that helps to show the unique position members of the LGBTQIA+ community have gone through in the latter half of the 20th century, through the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s, and continuing on to this day.
Weir’s accounts of burying friends are moving with enough dry wit and sarcasm that these otherwise devastatingly sad stories are tinged with some black comedy.
This memoir was written like a series of short stories and I really enjoyed the episodic equality of that. It felt less like I was reading someone’s personal account of their own life and more like a bunch of stories about the same character from different aspects of their life. Some of them were laugh out loud funny and other ones were painful.
I’m glad I got to read this one early!
Weir’s accounts of burying friends are moving with enough dry wit and sarcasm that these otherwise devastatingly sad stories are tinged with some black comedy.
This memoir was written like a series of short stories and I really enjoyed the episodic equality of that. It felt less like I was reading someone’s personal account of their own life and more like a bunch of stories about the same character from different aspects of their life. Some of them were laugh out loud funny and other ones were painful.
I’m glad I got to read this one early!
August 22, 2023
the phrase “My Son Died of AIDS and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt” is going to be rattling around in my head for a while
May 26, 2022
REVIEWED BY JESSICA WILLINGHAM FOR FIVE SOUTH
John Weir’s linked stories explore sexuality and separation through platonic love, activism, art, and death — in a time when gender was confined to “girl, boy, or faggot” and AIDS ravages a generation. Stories span the 70s, 80s, and 90s as an unnamed narrator navigates the long aftermath of an epidemic and tries to close the gap between loneliness and loss.
Weir’s big, witty voice carries through high school parties in rural New Jersey to porn theaters in Manhattan, political rallies, nursing homes, and funerals. His compassionate humor explores the aftermath of global crisis and nostalgia for different outcomes.
“My last name rhymes with ‘queer.’ Anyway, what’s in a name,” Weir writes. “So I’m twisted, thwarted and thwarting, fairy-like but fateful, not just silly but lethal, not just deadly but fated to die, kindling for fire, powerful and burning, but also inconsequential, dainty as threads pulled tight around delicate lace. And I’m the star. That’s what’s confusing. Trapped in their circle, surrounded and alone, I’m rejected and central, and here is the beginning of my lifelong inability to tell the difference between attention and pain.”
The opening story collection titled “AIDS Nostalgia” questions homophobia and masculinity. “I grew up thinking I would be a lonely woman who missed men,” Weir writes in “Kid A.” “I didn’t learn until later how lonely men are. Lonely for other men. Lonely because they’re supposed to be men.”
In “American Graffiti,” Weir’s searing observations on gender electrify the eras through film references, bringing them to life and focus.
“How I wanted to be Jane Fonda when I was twelve. I was in love with her self-consciousness. There was a space between her performance and herself. She didn’t consume her characters like Bette Davis devouring every part she played. Jane Fonda left a window open between her privacy and her sense of being seen. She knew who was watching: her directors and photographers, all men, with their penis cameras. I wanted her power to survive their gaze.”
Weir’s protagonist is often a voyeur to success, sex, and death — fully there but unable to share in it fully. But his characters are alive with intimacy and physicality, even when distance is the expectation for anonymous lovers or friends actively dying of AIDS. In “Neorealism at the Infiniplex,” the main character cares for an increasingly hateful friend in the late stage of the disease. Sometimes he outgrows a relationship, and sometimes he simply outlives it.
These eleven short stories are fast-paced with plenty of quick dialogue, pop culture, and political moments. Weir’s collection is a history lesson, a survival story, and a study on how to occupy the space between.
John Weir’s linked stories explore sexuality and separation through platonic love, activism, art, and death — in a time when gender was confined to “girl, boy, or faggot” and AIDS ravages a generation. Stories span the 70s, 80s, and 90s as an unnamed narrator navigates the long aftermath of an epidemic and tries to close the gap between loneliness and loss.
Weir’s big, witty voice carries through high school parties in rural New Jersey to porn theaters in Manhattan, political rallies, nursing homes, and funerals. His compassionate humor explores the aftermath of global crisis and nostalgia for different outcomes.
“My last name rhymes with ‘queer.’ Anyway, what’s in a name,” Weir writes. “So I’m twisted, thwarted and thwarting, fairy-like but fateful, not just silly but lethal, not just deadly but fated to die, kindling for fire, powerful and burning, but also inconsequential, dainty as threads pulled tight around delicate lace. And I’m the star. That’s what’s confusing. Trapped in their circle, surrounded and alone, I’m rejected and central, and here is the beginning of my lifelong inability to tell the difference between attention and pain.”
The opening story collection titled “AIDS Nostalgia” questions homophobia and masculinity. “I grew up thinking I would be a lonely woman who missed men,” Weir writes in “Kid A.” “I didn’t learn until later how lonely men are. Lonely for other men. Lonely because they’re supposed to be men.”
In “American Graffiti,” Weir’s searing observations on gender electrify the eras through film references, bringing them to life and focus.
“How I wanted to be Jane Fonda when I was twelve. I was in love with her self-consciousness. There was a space between her performance and herself. She didn’t consume her characters like Bette Davis devouring every part she played. Jane Fonda left a window open between her privacy and her sense of being seen. She knew who was watching: her directors and photographers, all men, with their penis cameras. I wanted her power to survive their gaze.”
Weir’s protagonist is often a voyeur to success, sex, and death — fully there but unable to share in it fully. But his characters are alive with intimacy and physicality, even when distance is the expectation for anonymous lovers or friends actively dying of AIDS. In “Neorealism at the Infiniplex,” the main character cares for an increasingly hateful friend in the late stage of the disease. Sometimes he outgrows a relationship, and sometimes he simply outlives it.
These eleven short stories are fast-paced with plenty of quick dialogue, pop culture, and political moments. Weir’s collection is a history lesson, a survival story, and a study on how to occupy the space between.
May 30, 2022
Your Nostalgia is Killing Me follows the narrator through a series of linked stories that revolve around the narrator's grief over the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s in New York City. Penned with Weir's self-deprecating wit and peppered with evocative allusions, the beauty and honesty of the writing keeps the pages turning, bringing the reader along on the experiences of a man that must cope with the scars that homophobia and the decimation of his community has left him. At times tragic, at times funny, Your Nostalgia is Killing Me will linger with the reader long after the last page.
August 1, 2024
Read John Weir's short fiction collection, - linked stories, as it were , Your Nostalgia is killing me'.
The book at times had me so emotional, and at other times was bit of a drag. But strength of the powerful parts were good enough make the whole book a worthwhile read.
The parts on our protagonist and narrator's adolescence, where he experiences the continued bullying by fellow students is heart wrecking.
"'I have nothing to give except myself and that doesn't seem to be enough.'
The guy who wrote the play, Tad Mosel, is gay, but I don't know this. He wrote Impromptu for his Yale classmates in 1949.
I still don't know anybody gay. Nobody openly gay, no one who identifies as gay. There is no such thing as 'identifying as gay'. I don't even know anyone who's been accused of being gay. You can only be accused of being gay and deny it. Nobody is gay. I don't even know if I'm guy." (from "It gets worse")
The descriptions of how him being different - in his walking, possibly talking etc., and how he had no one to turn to, in his painful discovery of himself, 40 years back, would give you a clear understanding why a bully shouldn't be tolerated. There are couple of stories of our narrator's school life (e.g. American Graffiti, It gets worse).
"I'm the high school homo. The boy who acts like a girl. I'm called a faggot every day. It starts in the morning when the school bus comes down Route 513, and the kids from Califon are already leaning out the windows two hundred yards away and screaming, 'Faggot!' At school, I'm pushed against lockers and punched in hallways and called a faggot on my way from one class to the next. When I get off the school bus at night, kids lean out the windows and scream, 'Faggot!' as the bus disappears out of sight" ( from "American Graffiti")
The second set of stories that I enjoyed were the ones which describe the last days of his friend, who died at the age of 38, from AIDS (e.g. Neorealism at the Infiniplex, Scenes from a marriage, It must be swell to be laying out dead, political funerals ).
"When Dave told me he had AIDS, the day we met, I liked him more. Creepy Fetish, dying men. Except it was 1989 in NYC, and the chance of meeting someone who didn't have AIDS, in that place and time - forgive the word - slim. And I hadn't kept anyone else alive, Maybe Dave. If he had five years, surely there'd be a cure..."
There was a time in the 80s, and the 90s, when a large section of the gay community, especially in New York, died of AIDS, since there was no medication to cure it, or control it. I was reminded of the lyrics of the Pet Shop Boys song, 'being boring' which refers to these many deaths.
Now I sit with different faces
In rented rooms and foreign places
All the people I was kissing
Some are here and some are missing
In the nineteen-nineties
I never dreamt that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be
But I thought in spite of dreams
You'd be sitting somewhere here with me
There had been political protests due to the inaction by the government towards research for a cure, and we see our narrator playing an active role in some of these protests."Release the drugs; AIDS won't wait", was one of the slogans.
The rest of the stories were on his post-Dave experiences, him spending his money to buy medicine for his AIDS infected close lovers (with no sex) etc. While these stories had there moments, they didn't come to the level of the first two categories of stories.
The short stories are all very well written, and most of them keep you engrossed, and revealing to you a period of the world's recent past, in which many suffered as a result of the essential human nature, that of being different, the necessity to love and of sex.
Highly recommended for lovers of modern English Fiction.
The book at times had me so emotional, and at other times was bit of a drag. But strength of the powerful parts were good enough make the whole book a worthwhile read.
The parts on our protagonist and narrator's adolescence, where he experiences the continued bullying by fellow students is heart wrecking.
"'I have nothing to give except myself and that doesn't seem to be enough.'
The guy who wrote the play, Tad Mosel, is gay, but I don't know this. He wrote Impromptu for his Yale classmates in 1949.
I still don't know anybody gay. Nobody openly gay, no one who identifies as gay. There is no such thing as 'identifying as gay'. I don't even know anyone who's been accused of being gay. You can only be accused of being gay and deny it. Nobody is gay. I don't even know if I'm guy." (from "It gets worse")
The descriptions of how him being different - in his walking, possibly talking etc., and how he had no one to turn to, in his painful discovery of himself, 40 years back, would give you a clear understanding why a bully shouldn't be tolerated. There are couple of stories of our narrator's school life (e.g. American Graffiti, It gets worse).
"I'm the high school homo. The boy who acts like a girl. I'm called a faggot every day. It starts in the morning when the school bus comes down Route 513, and the kids from Califon are already leaning out the windows two hundred yards away and screaming, 'Faggot!' At school, I'm pushed against lockers and punched in hallways and called a faggot on my way from one class to the next. When I get off the school bus at night, kids lean out the windows and scream, 'Faggot!' as the bus disappears out of sight" ( from "American Graffiti")
The second set of stories that I enjoyed were the ones which describe the last days of his friend, who died at the age of 38, from AIDS (e.g. Neorealism at the Infiniplex, Scenes from a marriage, It must be swell to be laying out dead, political funerals ).
"When Dave told me he had AIDS, the day we met, I liked him more. Creepy Fetish, dying men. Except it was 1989 in NYC, and the chance of meeting someone who didn't have AIDS, in that place and time - forgive the word - slim. And I hadn't kept anyone else alive, Maybe Dave. If he had five years, surely there'd be a cure..."
There was a time in the 80s, and the 90s, when a large section of the gay community, especially in New York, died of AIDS, since there was no medication to cure it, or control it. I was reminded of the lyrics of the Pet Shop Boys song, 'being boring' which refers to these many deaths.
Now I sit with different faces
In rented rooms and foreign places
All the people I was kissing
Some are here and some are missing
In the nineteen-nineties
I never dreamt that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be
But I thought in spite of dreams
You'd be sitting somewhere here with me
There had been political protests due to the inaction by the government towards research for a cure, and we see our narrator playing an active role in some of these protests."Release the drugs; AIDS won't wait", was one of the slogans.
The rest of the stories were on his post-Dave experiences, him spending his money to buy medicine for his AIDS infected close lovers (with no sex) etc. While these stories had there moments, they didn't come to the level of the first two categories of stories.
The short stories are all very well written, and most of them keep you engrossed, and revealing to you a period of the world's recent past, in which many suffered as a result of the essential human nature, that of being different, the necessity to love and of sex.
Highly recommended for lovers of modern English Fiction.
September 29, 2022
I enjoyed this book, but the entire time I was reading it, I was searching for some kind of vulnerability by the narrator. From such a snappy title, I was expecting to hear the thoughts, feelings, and raw emotion of someone going through life during the AIDS epidemic and seeing so many friends die, but the only vulnerability shown in these stories are other peoples’.
The problem with this was that the narrator would start digging into the trauma of the other characters, then seem trepidatious to continue after breaking the surface. A few times in this book, the reader would get to a point where we’d finally be able to experience the true emotion of someone going through the character’s experience, but then the author would say it wasn’t their place to continue digging. I understand that it might not be, but it keeps the reader at a distance.
I wanted to love this book, and at times I did. I just feel like the author had built up such strong walls and I was waiting and waiting for those walls to come down.
The problem with this was that the narrator would start digging into the trauma of the other characters, then seem trepidatious to continue after breaking the surface. A few times in this book, the reader would get to a point where we’d finally be able to experience the true emotion of someone going through the character’s experience, but then the author would say it wasn’t their place to continue digging. I understand that it might not be, but it keeps the reader at a distance.
I wanted to love this book, and at times I did. I just feel like the author had built up such strong walls and I was waiting and waiting for those walls to come down.
December 16, 2022
It's amazing how John Weir again and again returns to the era of AIDS, but it's always fresh and never a woe-is-me litany of loss. Yes, young men are dying, all friends of Weir whether fictional or real. But Weir strikes just the right balance of humor and high art. For every brutal image--"David was naked in a pine box"--there's an Elaine Stritch of a mom who happens to look like Grace Kelly. Though I'd read his first two novels, which traversed the same terrain, I found "Nostalgia" to be just as moving and insightful, and evocative of a time which seems like ancient history--or not.
January 14, 2023
I actually started this sometime back in the fall, but set it aside. I like a caustic, dry telling of one’s life story, but there was a tone here that felt like Weir still wasn’t ready to tell this story with vulnerability. I feel terrible saying that because Weir lived through a truly terrible era for the queer community, and I don’t want to crap on that or act like I wanted an uplifting tale with relentless positivity, but this just didn’t land for me. I probably would’ve gone with two stars, but the back half bumped this up to 3 stars.
August 15, 2022
Lacerating, funny, unflinching, unromanticized, highly emotional collection of short stories anchored by loss and HIV/AIDS. Each is its own trainwreck. It was impossible to look away. Sometimes narrated by gay characters that are unlovable, or no longer lovable, but very fully engaged in the lives of boyfriends, family and/or protest work, these stories give a view into survival not as a heroic act, but a bleak one.
April 22, 2023
Hard pressed to think of an author out there who can make you laugh, stop you in your tracks with unique insights and imagery, and break your heart, often in the same sentence and sometimes all at once. Like most great writers, his world is relentlessly specific and idiosyncratic, which makes it all somehow universal. Buy this book, and then buy another in case someone steals the first one.
June 26, 2022
This was probably a 3.5 for me. I couldn't quite get a hold on the main character/narrator--maybe he can't quite get a hold on himself either. I'm probably not the intended audience for this book, but it was still an interesting read.
June 7, 2022
Connected stories about living around HIV/AIDS in the early nineties.
July 7, 2022
Witty, humorous, and devastating.
July 31, 2022
This was a little disjointed because it’s a series of short stories. And it’s achingly sad. That being said, it leaves the reader with much to ponder.
September 22, 2022
This is the opposite of "feel good" - it hit me like a punch in the gut. It's well written (even when the author is writing bluntly or giving gory details) and filled with mourning.
October 22, 2022
No one spins a haunting/funny phrase like John Weir. Brilliant, darkly comic, tragic, this linked collection powerfully evokes a time past that continues to leave scars.
October 31, 2022
An AIDS memoir told in linked short stories that is far from depressing. In fact, it's really, really good. Funny and sad in equal measure. The narrator's voice is very, very cool.
April 10, 2023
Very relatable content to me. I feel I could've written these stories because of having several things in common with the author. Very honest feelings expressed.
May 9, 2023
Was pretty good if not a little dark
January 14, 2024
God. Just so good, perfect. I love John Weir and everything about this collection is perfect and beautifully achieved
June 24, 2022
Today is Friday, June 24, 2022, and the Supreme Court has officially overturned Roe v. Wade. Just a few hours before the news broke, I read the last story in this collection -- it's called "It Gets Worse."
In fact, many of the stories in Your Nostalgia is Killing Me are about death, dying, losing, longing, and not having -- appropriate themes for today.
Anyway, this is a really great collection of short stories. The first one in particular ("Neorealism at the Infiniplex") is a perfect example of how Weir combines comedy and tragedy, life and loss, what things actually feel like and what they should feel like. It's one of my all-time favorite short stories.
In fact, many of the stories in Your Nostalgia is Killing Me are about death, dying, losing, longing, and not having -- appropriate themes for today.
Anyway, this is a really great collection of short stories. The first one in particular ("Neorealism at the Infiniplex") is a perfect example of how Weir combines comedy and tragedy, life and loss, what things actually feel like and what they should feel like. It's one of my all-time favorite short stories.
November 28, 2025
I LOVE John Weir's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket. WONDERFUL BOOK. I've been searching for a new book by him and was happy to discover this, recently published.
This is a novel told in eleven linked stories. It's a tough read. It is wonderfully written BUT very hard to get through - depressing and brutal.
I know a friend who lost his partner to AIDS and I told him, This is NOT the book for you. Too many memories...and scars...from the AIDS epidemic in this book, running rampant in the 80s and 90s, with, then, no working antiviral meds.
The details of watching a friend die slowly and painfully are gut wrenching. And the jabs of being bullied as a "FAGGOT!" in a small town in the 70s, by homophobes, took me right back to my teenage years - and not in a good way. Again, PAINFUL TO READ.
And yet, there is much humor in here and in between the shudders and the sniffles, and the cringing, I found myself laughing a bit too.
It's quite a read - if you're brave enough. If you've ever been bullied, been a loner, lost a friend or loved one to AIDs, or found yourself wishing your mother wasn't quite so willing to find your sore spot(s) and attack it/them, then proceed with caution!
This is a novel told in eleven linked stories. It's a tough read. It is wonderfully written BUT very hard to get through - depressing and brutal.
I know a friend who lost his partner to AIDS and I told him, This is NOT the book for you. Too many memories...and scars...from the AIDS epidemic in this book, running rampant in the 80s and 90s, with, then, no working antiviral meds.
The details of watching a friend die slowly and painfully are gut wrenching. And the jabs of being bullied as a "FAGGOT!" in a small town in the 70s, by homophobes, took me right back to my teenage years - and not in a good way. Again, PAINFUL TO READ.
And yet, there is much humor in here and in between the shudders and the sniffles, and the cringing, I found myself laughing a bit too.
It's quite a read - if you're brave enough. If you've ever been bullied, been a loner, lost a friend or loved one to AIDs, or found yourself wishing your mother wasn't quite so willing to find your sore spot(s) and attack it/them, then proceed with caution!
October 25, 2022
As always, Weir's writing is smart and colloquial, while unafraid to delve into the depths of unspoken misery, which possibly seemed like some sort of happiness at the time. Excellent linked short stories that pull no punches.
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