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Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

by David Wojnarowicz

4.38 · Rating details · 1,245 Ratings · 103 Reviews

In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays - a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the "Fear of Diversity in America." From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most ...more

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Paperback, 288 pages

Published May 7th 1991 by Vintage

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Lists with This Book

Living with HIV and AIDS

74 books — 10 voters

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

The Hospital by the River by Catherine Hamlin

Lives Well Lived

23 books — 7 voters

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Jul 11, 2009 mark monday rated it it was amazing

Shelves: queertime, he-said-she-said, alpha-team

this abrasive, masterfully written, self-eviscerating, entirely unsentimental memoir is one that is practically boiling over with anger and lust and menace. it was an influential book in its own place and time... much like wojnarowicz's equally visceral yet haunting art. the free-flowing, stream of conscious writing recounts the author's life, his dreams, ambitions, failures, life on the streets, life with men, and - quite memorably - his dark and vindictive fantasies of vengeance on those who w ...more

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Apr 26, 2013 Jonathan rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2014-death-by-books

Essential reading for anyone (and that should be all of you) remotely interested in the early days of the AIDS crisis and in some excellent, angry, powerfully erotic prose. I have read a lot of LGBT literature over the years, and have no idea how I managed to miss this one.

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Jun 22, 2014 Bythedeed rated it really liked it

I read this book in a completely scattered order. It seems like it's a collection of different essays he wrote for different audiences, so reading it that way worked well for me.

At times Wojnarowicz seems completely damning everything - the family, the state, civilization, police, doctors, etc etc - but at other times says we need to legislate this or that change - perhaps a reflection of writing for different audiences.

Something about his writing that I can't quite put into words really spoke t ...more

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Apr 12, 2008 Michael rated it really liked it

Shelves: favorites

I really didn't know what to expect with this book, but found it unsettling for many reasons. It is primarily a memoir of Wojnarowicz's life in the 80s during the height of the onset of the AIDS crisis. It is set in NYC and mostly in the East Village. I lived there too then and Wojnarowicz and I ran in the same circles. I recognized some of the people that he was talking about even though he had changed the names. It is powerfully written for the most part and there is no question that it brough ...more

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Apr 21, 2017 Callum McAllister rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Less of a memoir, more of an essay collection, with each piece hanging somewhere on the spectrum between personal and political. Most of which were pretty sprawling and adventurous, without too much stringing them together - in a good way. You end up just sinking straight into the prose. It had all the things I liked about the beat gen without all the stuff I really don't.

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Mar 28, 2014 Peter Landau rated it it was amazing

How come so few people know who David Wojnarowicz is today? People who should know. I didn't know much about him other than a name I saw around that I couldn't pronounce. I still can't pronounce it, but I'm going to learn how. It's voy-nah-ROH-vitch, according to his NYT obit. That's important.

His memoir is impressionistic, wandering, grammatically loose, but drew me in slowly and then so tight I couldn't escape. Now I want to read everything by him and about him. At first, I was, Ugh, another c ...more

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Oct 12, 2014 Allan rated it liked it

This memoir was published in 1991 by the artist David Wojnarowicz, and is a pretty difficult read. It's a very angry book made up of chapters about different aspects of life and society at that time, and given the author's personal circumstances (a gay man who has contracted AIDS) one can understand why.

He is scathing about the US federal government's, NYC administration's and Catholic church's lack of action in tackling the virus, both through education and treatment programmes. He details the ...more

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Dec 27, 2007 Alexander rated it it was amazing

This book altered me forever---my politics, my sentences, my sensibility, my sense of what I wanted from life and from existence, from my country, from what it could mean to 'have politics', or to 'have sex'---everything. Afterward everything was different. And I was glad.

Relieved, even.

Also, I have a signed copy I got when I was a store clerk at A Different Light Books in San Francisco in the late 80s.

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Sep 06, 2012 Riotaccordion loeffler rated it it was amazing

Maybe the best book i've ever read.
fucking and magic
and nihilism.

It's dark.
and so good.

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Jan 22, 2017 Pamster rated it it was amazing

This hurt a lot.

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Aug 08, 2017 Ralowe Ampu rated it it was amazing

now i know why the difficult-looking-to-pronounce name rolls sotto and breathless through the alt fag underworld; i’m putting david wojnarowicz up there with the urgent ethical desperation of assata shakur. dead cops and orgasms: i’m very familiar with this particular queer mode combining counterhegemonic criminality and proximity to death: genet, wilde, etc. wojnarowicz’ experience, of faggotry and aids, is the fracture from which the collapse of the entire bloodthirsty state establishment appa ...more

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Jan 03, 2008 Lex rated it really liked it

Shelves: theory-gay-and-otherwise, novels, biographies

This book is so important to my understanding of the queer 80's and 90's, in a way I am not even sure is entirely fair. His prose poetry, brilliant conspiracy cum political philosophy, and precious/violent take on sexuality and the body relating to other bodies is a vibrant echo of what was, an what is still vibrating through the haunted house of modern gay history in the US. I love the way he speaks about the Queer who was the bane of the assimilationist gay America that all but won the 90's, b ...more

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Nov 06, 2011 Michael Dipietro rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: lifelong-influence, beautiful-misanthropy, queer-this-narrative

I am almost without words for this book. It was incredibly dark and painful to read, and yet extremely seductive. Drilling the same points home over and over about evil people in state and religious drag, effecting a quiet holocaust with their mishandling of AIDS and with constant efforts to make queer people, queer lives and identities invisible.... I began to feel the same desolation and ennui that Wojnarowicz describes in his own experience, so eloquently. The ending is extremely visceral; I ...more

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Jul 08, 2012 Katie rated it it was amazing

“I want to throw up because we're supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I'm amazed we're not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

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Aug 14, 2017 Andrew Marshall rated it really liked it · review of another edition

If an author had made up the life of the artist David Wojnarowicz, his editor would claim the story was unbelievable. His alcoholic father kidnapped him when he was a small boy and subjected him to regular beatings. He ran away from home and became a teenage rent boy. Despite this unpromising start, he managed to get himself off the street and created some iconic art. If you put his name into google pictures, you'll recognise the self portrait with his mouth stitched closed and the picture of bu If an author had made up the life of the artist David Wojnarowicz, his editor would claim the story was unbelievable. His alcoholic father kidnapped him when he was a small boy and subjected him to regular beatings. He ran away from home and became a teenage rent boy. Despite this unpromising start, he managed to get himself off the street and created some iconic art. If you put his name into google pictures, you'll recognise the self portrait with his mouth stitched closed and the picture of buffalo tumbling off a cliff (which was used for the cover of U2's 'One').

This collection of essays starts with an account of his hustler years where he was so deprived of sleep (as he had nowhere to live) and of food that his gums would bleed from smoking a cigarette. He writes about his hallucinations in a poetic manner that I found beautiful and stomach churning at the same time. There is plenty of passion too from his first hand account of the AIDS crisis in eighties and early nineties in America where politicians were silent and the church was campaigning against the use of condoms. His account of his best friend and former lover hauling himself off his death bed to travel half way across New York to a quack doctor (who is offering typhoid shots in the belief that it will shock the immune system into working again) is one of the most chilling stories I have ever read. Especially as Wojnarowicz, like all his friends, had HIV and would go onto die shortly after this book was first published. Unfortunately, some of the essays tend to repeat themselves and I found the section on a heterosexual friend who committed suicide, which is the longest one, the least interesting - hence the four stars

Although known more as an artist, Wojnarowicz is definitely a writer to admire. His dispatch from the front-line of death, at first, seems too extreme for our kinder times - when newspaper articles are no longer written and TV programmes made as if nobody gay is reading or watching them and HIV has become a manageable condition - but when you stop and think, we are dying and everybody we know too (just not as quickly or as young as Wojnarowicz and his friends) and we too need to face our mortality. I just hope that I will do it with the same clear sight and passion as he achieved. ...more

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Apr 24, 2017 Connor Murphy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Reading this felt like bleeding. The raw fury, desperation and, most importantly, the love that radiates from this memoir is overwhelmingly beautiful. It bruises, it shatters, it roars with an intensity that I have experienced in only a handful of books. As I am writing this I am on the verge of tears. I will always remember this book - more than that, it will make itself apparent every day; on transport, in friendships, in romance, as I get up in the morning... in all of these quiet moments, I ...more

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Dec 27, 2015 Phil Sun rated it really liked it

Shelves: re-read

As an undergrad in Berkeley at the tail-end of the 90s, I was enthralled by this memoir, a collection of essays describing artist David Wojnarowicz's tumultuous life and impending death from AIDS. The stigma of AIDS still lingered, the cultural battles over representation and pornography were fresh in memory, and the homophobia of mainstream society was a close spectre, as attested by the brutal murder of 20-year-old Matthew Shepard in 1998, so Wojnarowicz’s writing was very visceral and relevan As an undergrad in Berkeley at the tail-end of the 90s, I was enthralled by this memoir, a collection of essays describing artist David Wojnarowicz's tumultuous life and impending death from AIDS. The stigma of AIDS still lingered, the cultural battles over representation and pornography were fresh in memory, and the homophobia of mainstream society was a close spectre, as attested by the brutal murder of 20-year-old Matthew Shepard in 1998, so Wojnarowicz’s writing was very visceral and relevant at the time. One of the few books I brought to Ireland, my copy is stained and warped from water damage, marked by fading purple highlighter and sticky tabs of pink paper that curl out like tongues. I didn’t return to it for years, though; it remained in my library, as a rejoinder to the cool and measured Joan Didion, whose writing inspires both admiration and uneasiness that I have yet to fully examine. Anyways, as I was deciding on what books to read over this holiday, I put it in my pile, curious to see how it would hold now, after all those years.

The writing is much like his visual work: confrontational, surreal, polemical, always propulsive; unsettling reading in Christmas-time rural Ireland. Early in the book, Wojnarowicz documents his time as a hustler in NYC and the sexual encounters he has with men, real or imagined. He takes a road trip across America, having one-night stands and violent fantasies or dreams in a dystopian landscape, full of dead spaces, “decaying personalities”, and architecture that reflects a society oriented toward death, or impermanence. Later on, a passionate chronicle of the AIDS crisis unfolds. Wojnarowicz laments the slow dying and death of friends and acquaintances, while condemning the moral panic over AIDS and governmental failure to deal with the epidemic in a compassionate manner. “Bigotry is ugly, but even more so when it poses as virtue.” (135) Trying to understand his time, he writes, “I'm a prisoner of language that doesn’t have a letter or a sign or gesture that approximates what I’m sensing. Rage may be one of the few things that binds me to you, to our pre-invented world.” (117)

In the final essay, Wojnarowicz considers the life and death of his friend Dakota through interviews and recollections, so that at times the essay comes across as the transcript of a documentary. Here is much rage against the conservative moralism of American political culture, expressed by Wojnarowicz and his compatriots through art/zine-making and drug episodes. However, the drugs only push them toward psychic disintegration. He writes about his friends’ fantasies about killing, and their scene’s general fascination with death, a symptom of a society that wants to kill them for not conforming to what he calls the mythos of the “One-Tribe Nation”. In the postscript, Wojnarowicz considers his violent childhood, interspersing these reflections with short descriptions of the ritualistic killing of a bull by a torero. Like the bull, Wojnarowicz and Dakota are, as queer men in America, being ritualistically slaughtered, via the violence of the family structure, and the violence of heteropatriarchal society.

This is a gripping and harrowing work, alleviated by occasions of beauty. For Wojnarowicz, queer love connects him to a greater history: “In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.” (17) Elsewhere, he describes “vagrant frescoes painted with rough hands on the peeling walls, huge murals of rude men painted with beige and brown colours coupling several feet above the floorboards” which come to life, to “line the walls like figurines before firing squads or figures in a breadline in old times pressed into history.” (21-22) Reflecting on all the dying around him, Wojnarowicz writes, “I want to keep breathing and moving until I arrive at a place where motion and strength and relief intersect.” (261)

Wojnarowicz’s project is not simply the representation of queer culture, but a queering of American culture and history, of the American landscape itself. He deals with the burden of the dominant mythos of America and its murderous history by paying attention to the body, to its desires, an attention that carves a space for it outside of the machinations of the State. According to Wojnarowicz, the imagination is the only way we might recover what is dislocated by the violences of the American myth: the natural, the instinctive, the rich diversity of human life. Through art and self-representation, one might disrupt the dominant myth-machine. Thus the most radical aspect of the book is his realisation that “I always tend to mythologize the people, things, landscapes I love, always wanting them to somehow extend forever through time and motion.” (79)
...more

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Dec 08, 2007 Christopher rated it it was amazing

Shelves: books-writers-inspiring-to-me, re-reading

My thoughts on it from February 2009:
Stunning, soul breaking and thought reforming writing, that I decided to read again, because I wanted to get authentic views on gay prostitution as survival in earlier decades for my punk novel. In a way I felt a profound disconnection from the material when I started it, despite the beautiful writing-as a middle class white gay guy who's never been denied the essentials of life, I felt my sometimes naive eyes almost widening at the blunt truth of a white gay ...more

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Apr 28, 2010 Eric rated it really liked it

"Of course, those in power count on the fact that we are stuck inside these gravity vehicles called bodies. The pressure that gravity sustains on our bodies keeps us crawling around in this preinvented existence with the neighbors split-rail fencing preventing us from crawling out. The pressure for escape has led us from our tadpole ancestors through time till now to develop an appetite for speed. Speed of consumption, speed of physical movement, speed of transmitting and receiving information. ...more

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Dec 18, 2016 Mandy rated it did not like it

Artist and AIDS activist, David Wojnarowicz has written a powerful, angry polemic and memoir, often a graphic one, and I can see from the many reviews that it is a much loved and admired volume. I accept that I am perhaps not the intended reader, but I found little to engage me here and little to relate to. I learnt a lot from it, especially about how the growing AIDS crisis was dealt with at the time and I can understand Wojnarowicz’s anger, but that doesn’t make it good literature. It’s a chal ...more

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Aug 15, 2016 Jennifer rated it it was amazing

One of those books where I didn't exactly know where it was taking me, but then all of a sudden I was in the middle of everything.

"A group of street kids no older than twelve sat on the stone curb and searched each others' scalps for lice. Seeing a few shreds of humanity in a person causes me to immediately love them, deeply."

Exhausting. Ethereal. Angry. Important. Violent. Beautiful.

I will never get over the beautiful, artistic, loving souls AIDS stole from us. They still have so much to say.

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Jul 16, 2012 Mary Shanley rated it it was amazing

Powerful and poetic indictment of government and society by the artist/activist.

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Aug 07, 2017 Richard Jespers rated it it was amazing

David Wojnarowicz (voyna-ROW-vich) was born in 1954. His father beat him, and he was sexually abused by older boys. He barely finished high school and did not attend college, yet in the 1980s he became, for a short time, an art sensation in New York. He didn’t care about success, often living hand to mouth, and refused to take the next step that would ensure stability. That would have been selling out.

“David’s work was full of sex and violence—politics expressed at the level of the body. He pai

“David’s work was full of sex and violence—politics expressed at the level of the body. He painted distress. Soldiers and bombers. Falling buildings and junkies. His images had the tension of some niceness opened up to its ruined heart. In the montages he began to develop, David would expose the Real Deal under the artifacts—wars and rumors of wars, industrial wastelands, mythological beasts, and the evolutionary spectrum from dinosaur to humanity’s rough beast” (231).

David was gay but arrived at that place by way of a rather indirect route. He preferred the intimacy of a relationship but often turned to the anonymous sex prevalent in New York City until the AIDS crisis became a problem. In the late eighties, he and his longtime companion were tested and both came up HIV positive.

“David was beginning to consciously connect his family’s pathology to a larger worldview. He added an anecdote in the Eye about watching a cop kick a dope-sick junkie while arresting him: ‘And I’m feeling rage ‘cause in the midst of my bad mood this cop is inadvertently reaching in with his tentacles and probing in icepick fashion some vulnerable area from years ago maybe when my dad took me down in the basement for another routine of dog chain and baseball bat beatings or when he killed my pet rabbit and made me eat it . . . blam . . . blam . . . blam’" (312).

“In the years after David’s death, Tom Rauffenbart sprinkled David’s ashes in places that had held meaning for him. He took some to the beach in St. John’s where they’d had their first sexy romantic vacation. He left ashes at the Great Swamp of New Jersey, at Teotihuacán, and at what was left of the Christopher Street pier. Then in October 1996, he joined in ACT UP’s second ‘Ashes Action’ in Washington, D.C. He got up to the fence and threw David onto the White House lawn” (578). It was something David had wanted, when he realized there would be no cure, to have his dead body thrown on the White House lawn.

The death of so many men may be one of the reasons why I continue to write. Not only must I do so in order to stay sane, alive, but I must do it for these people whose lives were cut short by a hateful and unrelenting disease—and a still indifferent culture. I’m surely not as gifted as David Wojnarowicz, but I must not waste the time given me. I participated in some of the same risky behaviors that many of my contemporaries did, and I was fortunate enough to emerge with a different roll of the dice. I must work to honor David and Tom. Would they still be together now? Would David have embraced his success? Would his burgeoning career have matured or fizzled out? Multiply his life times the hundreds or thousands of gifted gay men of that era who died. Their voices continue to shout at us from their discordant chorus. We owe a great debt to Cynthia Carr for allowing us to hear one of these voices loud and clear. ...more

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Jun 03, 2017 Sandra rated it really liked it

Era artista de infancia difícil. Madre perdida, padre brutal. Se crió en la calle, se prostituyó en la calle y descubrió su homosexualidad en la calle. Antes de que limpiaran Nueva York, claro. El SIDA mató al amor de su vida, Peter Hujar. David fotografió su cara y sus pies en su lecho de muerte. Estaba exhausto, verdaderamente indignado, enrabietado. Sus amigos caían como moscas mientras el gobierno de EE.UU. negaba dinero a la investigación, negaba evidencias y negaba asistencia. Los curas ne ...more

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May 22, 2017 Emma rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017-tbr, memoir-personal-non-fiction, essays

I'm struggling to find a way to put into words what this book meant to me, how much it stirred up. It's not fluid in the way many memoirs I've read recently are, and yet every piece fits together so perfectly. Disintegration is the perfect word - the book itself is fragmentary, and it's so concerned with the AIDS crisis that the disintegration of people, relationships, and communities is ever present. And to read over a quarter of a century later, the disintegration of history is impossible not ...more

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Dec 09, 2016 Mel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: some-of-my-best-reads, books-for-queers, from-the-library, alternate-thinking, non-fiction, autobiography, history, alternate-history, rugged-individuals, utopia-or-dystopia, read-in-2016

Wow! This was a really great book! Much of it (sadly) suddenly pertinent to right now! I could quote something off every page. Parts of this brought back some tough memories and was very hard to read. This author does not try to sugar coat anything, so this is not for the faint of heart. Great writing! Loved it! 5 stars and one of my best reads of 2016. (Probably THE best read of 2016)

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Jun 22, 2017 Jay Jadick rated it really liked it

Must-read: poetics, rants, euphoria, disintegration. A wake-up call to arms.

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Mar 05, 2017 oleander added it

fucking devastating

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Feb 19, 2017 Siobhan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Close To The Knives is a beautifully written memoir about the artist’s turbulent life, politics and the AIDS crisis, and about art, life, and humanity. It is written in a series of sections which are in different styles and take broadly different focuses, but overall emerges a picture of not only Wojnarowicz, but of life in America in the 70s and 80s and the harsh realities of a world torn apart by AIDS and victimised by the government.

The chapters vary, with some giving details and political at ...more

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Jan 17, 2016 Frank Terry rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

God-damnit...this book was just fucking incredible. I'm wrecked right now.

This book means the world to me. It was ultra, super healing in so many ways. I mean, reading about the AIDS crisis, that's kind of what convinced me that I had to become an atheist.

David really calls out individual after individual both within the Church and American government in this book, quoting some of the shit different priests said about not using condoms and how hard they fought to keep people away from sexual f ...more

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About David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz was a gay painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.

He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and later lived with his mother in New York City, where he attended the High School of Performing Arts for a brief period. From 1970 until 1973, after dropping out of school, he for a time lived on ...more

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In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz

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“Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.” — 33 likes

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