This book did not work for me. As another reviewer noted, it reads like self-insert fanfiction about the AIDS crisis. (Sorry to all of the well-written fanfic I’ve read. I don’t mean you!)

The narrator manages to meet every famous gay person in New York, stumbling into prominence as an activist in the process and succeeding at everything because he’s so “naturally likable” and because everyone wants to sleep with him.

There are copious footnotes that at first I thought were going to be relevant to the plot. The book is written as a fictional memoir, after all; maybe there would be an interesting framing device? Maybe some tension between the narrator and the character editing his manuscript? But no. The footnotes mostly seem to serve the purpose of preventing the reader from having to Google anything, and they come across as achingly pedantic.

And I disliked the writing. The prose is flat, plot points frequently wrap up too quickly or just go nowhere, and the ending doesn’t wrap up anything at all. It felt like a disservice to what little characterization is present and to the readers investing 200+ pages of time into reading the book.

I can understand the urge to write about this period of history and to educate people about it through fiction, but this just isn’t it. Disappointing.