Until My Heart Stops, by Jameson Currier

[Ulysses]

Until My Heart Stops
By Jameson Currier
Chelsea Station Editions, 2015
Four stars

“I don’t think I became the man I imagined I would become, certainly my life is no longer gay in the way that it used to be.”

I’m on a roll with memoirs it seems. Having recently read and reviewed both Chasten and Pete Buttigieg’s memoirs—and they’re young enough to be my kids—I was compelled to pick up Jameson Currier’s 2015 memoir, “Until My Heart Stops”—a collection of essays written over decades. So why did I feel drawn to read this, rather than Elton John’s “Me,” which has lurked on my kindle for months? Oddly enough, I realize, that’s an easy question to answer: Sir Elton’s memoir is a work of public relations and celebrity worship (however good it might be). The two Buttigieg’s books, each very different from the other, were certainly written with an eye to the all-too-fleeting attention of the American public. This was the time to strike for them and their publishers, as well as the time for me to read them. I figure Elton John will still be famous in the future, whenever I finally get around to his story.

Jameson Currier, however, is not a celebrity. He’s the opposite of a celebrity—he’s a writer. Some writers do become celebrities, but not most of them. More importantly, Currier was born two months after I was in 1955, and we have spent most of our adult lives within twenty miles of each other. What’s interesting about that is that we have lived, on our parallel urban/suburban tracks, drastically different lives. And yet, Jameson’s “Until My Heart Stops” resonated constantly and deeply with me as I read through his multifarious collection of essays, arranged more or less chronologically. Some of the chapters are outright funny. Some more wry in their humor. Others are simply painful, because they recount gay histories—especially the history of AIDS in the 1980s and 90s—that pulse with the sorrow of loss and the angry helplessness the gay world felt as our members died and died and died. Still other essays in this book are poignant, filled with the author’s self-reckoning over his own choices.

Both the author and I grew up in post-War suburban Protestant worlds—his in the South, mine in the North—and we were both drawn, for different reasons, to the gravitational pull of Manhattan. (Forget Brooklyn, Brooklyn was nothing when we were young.) We are also both gay, but, so it seems, in rather different ways. Jameson’s life is both familiar and alien to me. His book describes a Manhattan I knew in my twenties, thirties, and on throughout my adult life. His story is full of people whom I didn’t know, but who are nonetheless recognizable to me. I have trouble believing that we didn’t know some of the same people, at least tangentially.

Let me try to sum up the difference through the example of a specific chapter: Currier was in downtown Manhattan on 9-11, and experienced the city’s trauma from a front row seat. I, on the other hand, saw the Twin Towers burning from a the platform of a commuter train in Newark, New Jersey, ten miles away. From the balcony, as it were. Jameson’s life has been one of urban intensity, his experience embodying all those beliefs, both true and false, about gay life in New York. The other key feature of our lives that makes his memoir so fascinating to me, is that he chose to live in New York, while I chose not to.

“…I still wonder why things happened the way they did and what things might have happened if things were different.”

Ultimately, this is the artistic and historical value of a memoir, to render an “ordinary” life visible to the reader. It gives the reader a chance to travel back in time (even one lifetime), and to see a world through someone else’s eyes. A good memoir is a work of literary art, something that gives pleasure because of the writer’s skill, not because of whatever fame or notoriety he brings to the tale. No memoir includes everything about the writer’s life; it is filtered and edited with a clear purpose. It is, to use the term I hate but which is nonetheless au courant, curated. A memoir, like the memoirist’s own life, is the result of choices. This or that, yes or no.

You cannot understand any generation by reading one memoir of a famous person. More importantly, to understand what being gay in America in the 20th century meant, you can’t read just one memoir, and it certainly can’t be Elton John’s. What really blew my mind about “Until My Heart Stops,” was the fact that one person’s memories can more than double your understanding of the world as you yourself remember it. Adding other people’s memories to your own can only give you a deeper, richer, more compassionate understanding of life itself. It can affirm your beliefs or it can shake your faith; but a good memoir will never leave you the same.

[Robert]

Brilliant responses. I must read this book.