FERAL CITY

A dynamic memoir of life during lockdown in New York City.

Through a series of essays, writer and psychotherapist Moss shares his experiences as a transgender man during the quarantine period. In the 1990s, writes the author, he ran to the city “to be free and find my people.” However, over the past 25 years, the city has changed drastically, a process the author examined insightfully and ruefully in Vanishing New York. During this time, he writes, the “New People” took over, and they “are the same everywhere, colonizing cities with a mass-produced, globalized state of mind.” From inside his small apartment in the East Village, he watched as New People moved in, looking “like a J. Crew catalog, ultra-white and monied, everything new and polished, not a speck of human messiness.” However, on March 16, 2020, Moss awoke to a ghost town, and the city began to feel like its old, chaotic self. The piles of Amazon packages subsided, music played in the streets again, and parks began rewilding. For years, Moss recalls, he felt invisible, so he tried to blend in and look normal. When the pandemic set in, however, “the streets were reclaimed by the Blacks, the queers, the socialists, the freaks,” and the author was moved to participate in Black Lives Matter and other protests. Eventually, though, people began feeling powerless, and riots and looting began increasing in frequency. With raw emotion and spot-on sociological portraits, Moss ponders the reasons why “I feel such relief in the turbulence of the disorderly city.” As the pandemic has dragged on, more and more people express the desire to want things to get “back to normal,” whatever that means. “Normal is the last thing I want to go back to,” writes the author. With the city returning to so-called “normal,” writes Moss, “the streets become remarkably whiter,” and “an obliterating sameness” resumes.

A captivating chronicle driven by keen wit, a strong sense of place, and a clear love of a city’s old soul.