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book: What I Did Wrong
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What I Did Wrong

Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2022

About this book

Set in a rapidly gentrifying New York City determined to move beyond the decimation of a generation a decade earlier, What I Did Wrong is a day in the life of Tom, a forty-two-year-old English professor, haunted by the death of his best friend, Zack, who died theatrically and calamitously of AIDS. Tom himself slouches gingerly and precariously into middle age questioning every certainty he had about himself as a gay man while negotiating the field of his college classes, populated as they are with guys whose cocky bravado can’t quite compensate for their own confused masculinity. Tom tries to balance his awkwardly developing friendships with them. In the process, he begins to find common ground with these proud young men and, surprisingly, a way to claim his own place in the world, and in history.

A powerfully moving—and often disarmingly funny—book about loss, character, and sexuality in the wake of AIDS, What I Did Wrong is a survivor’s tale in an age when all certainties have lost their logic and focus. It is a romance that embraces its objects from the traumas of toxic masculinity to the aftermath of catastrophic loss amidst the enduring allure of New York City in all its manic and heartbreaking grandeur.

Traces the fragmented consciousness of a character who is undergoing a delayed response to trauma from surviving the AIDS epidemic in a rapidly gentrifying New York City.

Author / Editor information

Contributor: John Weir John Weir is a professor of English and creative writing at Queens College, CUNY. He is the author of two novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket and What I Did Wrong, both available from New York ReLit, an imprint of Fordham University Press. Weir’s short story collection, Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me (Red Hen Press, 2022), is the winner of the 2020 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction.

Reviews

A lovely, wrenching, funny, erudite novel, heavy with history and loss and beauty.---David Rakoff --- Weir’s prose has humor and grace to spare. --- Extraordinary . . . among other things one of the best books about how ordinary folks live in New York now.---Edmund White, The Village Voice --- A wry memoir of the AIDS era that is not so much elegy as ode to a hopeful and even lyric future.

Topics

  • Publicly Available

    Frontmatter

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  • Publicly Available

    Contents

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  • PART ONE: GENDER TROUBLE
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    Texas Is the Reason

    1
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    Deadguy

    25
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    Youthanasia

    45
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    Songs for Swinging lovers

    63
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    Where Do You See Yourself?

    79
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    Already Gone

    103
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  • PART TWO: OPEN SECRETS
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    Sick Fuck

    123
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    They live by Night

    149
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    How to Disappear Completely

    167
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    Kevin Spacey Has a Secret

    193
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    The Destiny of Me

    211
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    Abgesturzt

    229
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
July 6, 2022
eBook ISBN:
9780823299461
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823299461
eBook ISBN: 9780823299461
Keywords for this book
Fiction; LGBTQ Studies; New York City & Regional
Audience(s) for this book
For a non-specialist adult audience
Downloaded on 2.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780823299461/html
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