I Can Give You Anything But Love

by Gary Indiana Narrated by Daniel Henning

Overview

The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Described by the London Review of Books as one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today," Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments.



With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work-from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post-summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this-his most personal book yet-the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing book and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Beautifully written, Gary Indiana’s ‘memoir’ is one of his greatest books: a heartbreaking, astringently accurate account of the tidal shifts between the American 20th and 21st centuries. Indiana is one of the smartest, most truthful writers living today." —Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia and After Kathy Acker

"Gary Indiana's memoir is written with both laconic distance and a sense of urgency. It is comic and then almost melancholy. He can create memorable characters and dramatic moments in stylish sentences that seem effortless. But, more than anything, this book is a display of a personality that is sardonic and sharp, fiercely intelligent, vulnerable and original." —Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island

"I Can Give You Anything but Love recounts the wicked adventures of old Gary in Cuba and young Gary living dangerously in the demimondes of LA, San Francisco, Boston, and New York, in prose so conversant and apt it’s like a superpower, like ease in a foreign element, breathing underwater or flying. Fueled by Swiftian indignation at our unbelievable stupidity, accuracy is a kind of revenge on a world that declines to return our love. Young Gary suffers the opposite of an education: he unlearns till all that remains is chaos and invisibility. He respects beautiful flesh and friendship’s damaged utopia as he encounters others who are also desperate, brilliant, and sometimes famous." —Robert Glück, author of About Ed 

"Gossipy and acerbic, raunchy and unsentimental, I Can Give You Anything but Love defies the conventional moods and gestures of memoir to give us a portrait of the young man who will become Gary Indiana: one of the most gifted, most uncompromising writers of our era." —Ryan Ruby, author of The Zero and the One

Kirkus Reviews

2015-06-28
A writer, filmmaker, playwright, and artist recalls his past. In this ironically titled memoir, Indiana (Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World, 2010, etc.) gives little evidence of love but much graphic detail of sex, focused often on comparative penis sizes and tumescence. Although he claims to have "an unshakeable sense of utter insignificance," being "too peculiar to figure importantly in anyone's life, including my own," his voice throughout tends to be supercilious. Indiana characterizes his parents as "emotionally constipated," creating an environment that prepared him "for absolutely nothing." Growing up within "a swamp of human wreckage tainted by alcohol," any problem, he was taught, "was other people's fault." Early sexual experiences with boys left him believing that "sodomy was an arcane, specialized perversion, like bestiality." In his 20s, he was subject to panic attacks and depression; pickups did not fulfill his "pinching wish for attachment." In late-1960s California, Indiana "lived on no money, with no fixed address, becoming a ward of whatever boyfriend or commune whose orbit I drifted into," usually connected to his friend Ferd, a political activist and porno filmmaker. In those years, writes the author, psychedelic drugs "were taken like aspirin…and heroin users were seen as the truly daring souls, more ‘seriously' troubled than aimless run-of-the-mill LSD dropouts." Ferd often sent him to emergency rooms to steal syringes, errands he performed with alacrity. Later, living in Cuba, the author had an affair—"a complete pornographic fantasy"—with a sexually energetic deaf mute, a relationship he quickly found "tiresome." Among those singled out for scorn is Susan Sontag: arrogant, "exasperating," a woman whose "chronic aesthetic gourmandizing filled her with a histrionic rapture that required live witnesses." David Lynch was humorless, boring, and "smarmy." Indiana remarks that his memories are "colored by mood and contingency." The mood of this memoir is mostly rueful, bitter, and sad.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192649848
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	07/09/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

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