ABOUT ED

An autofiction elegy for both a former lover and the AIDS era.

The Ed of the title is Ed Aulerich-Sugai, an acclaimed painter who died of AIDS in 1994. He and artist-essayist-poet Glück were lovers in the early '70s, though this book doesn’t strictly chronicle their relationship, breakup, and friendship. Instead, Glück delivers lyric-essay chapters on his San Francisco neighbors as well as friends lost to AIDS through the '80s, bouncing between erotic remembrances of hookups to more mournful thoughts about Ed’s death. Glück’s tone can be wryly comic in remembering this era: “There were not enough orgasms in the universe to cut through the knot of tension that was Ed.” Or it can be gently lyrical: “Burning isolation. From each red window Ed’s outstreached arms. I’m safe in heaven, somehow.” And there’s a genuine tenderness in some moments, as when he recalls washing Ed’s body with another lover after his death. But there’s no prevailing order to this jumble of remembrances, which makes it hard to find a throughline in either Ed’s personality or his relationship with Robert—and makes a scene of coprophilia even more blindsiding than it’d usually be. Much of the closing sections are dedicated to Ed’s dream journals, which deploy a variety of metaphors around sex and illness, including shape-shifting, war, and Dennis Cooper-ish visions of incest and pedophilia. Glück’s delivery here is abstract (“We run for our lives, dodging sunbeams filtered through a mesh of arching roses”), and anybody troubled by transgression is shopping in the wrong aisle. But it’s as tedious to experience Ed’s dreams at length as anybody’s, and though Glück plainly strives to be affirming and loving, the prose is more often exhausting.

A sui generis but wearying examination of grief.