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At Certain Points We Touch

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I crash into my apartment, drop my coat to the floor and skitter, still drunk, towards the kitchen table. I know that I have to begin right here and now, at 5.15 a.m., at least to make a start, if I am to ever to crawl up out of this perdition. With a clean sweep of my right hand I clear a mess of mail and half-read magazines from the tabletop, grab for my computer with my left, and began to write. I found the author unable to covey why this particular man was so addictive to the central character, which kind of undermined the story as it just wasn't believable. When did you know you were dead? I’m asking you a question that I know you can never answer. It is now ten years since we met, six years since we last spoke, four years since your death, and I’m writing you this from Mexico City, under grave obligation. It is not a letter, since I know you cannot reply; maybe it’s another monologue, certainly it does not require a second choice; let’s call it plainsong then. This is the chant recalling your life, it is fiction, it is biography, it is transfiguration”.

But there’s also no opportunity to grow. There’s grey space in their time in the most formative years of adulthood. Jetting off to people who don’t treat each other poorly. Intersections of poverty and queerness and internalized socialization are complex. It gives a lot of space to show all the characters, including Thomas, in a very humanistic light. One that makes it really difficult to condemn anyone, even when they ought to be perhaps, especially in this day and age of cancel culture though, when you have the full measure, or near it, the ability to shun seems to allude to a fate worse than death. Before it was even fashionable. It's four in the morning, and our narrator is walking home from the club when they realise that it's February 29th – the birthday of the man who was something like their first love. Piecing together art, letters and memory, they set about trying to write the story of a doomed affair that first sparked and burned a decade ago.

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A debut that lies in the gutter while looking up at the stars, with moving, if sometimes overindulgent, results. All of which was to say, the emotional heart of this novel I understood more than I felt. I didn’t blame the heroine for her terrible taste in men, but I felt I zero connection to either the terrible Thomas James or the less-terrible Adam who provide the corners of this nasty little love triangle. And, of course, maybe that was the point: this is, after all, a story Bibby is narrating and better for it to be about her than the two basic cis men in her life, but I think with them never feeling quite real, it impacted the realness of Bibby too.

Ten years earlier, our young narrator and a boy named Thomas James fall into bed with one another over the summer of their graduation. Their ensuing affair, with its violent, animal intensity and its intoxicating and toxic power plays initiates a dance of repulsion and attraction that will cross years, span continents, drag in countless victims-and culminate in terrible betrayal.A phenomenal eulogy to, presumably, a fictional gay lover from a trans woman in what appears to be the early oughts almost coming-of-age story nested in the (again, fictional, I presume) London queer scene of the time. On the anniversary of her lover's death, she descends into a fit of hypergraphia—chronicling—through an open letter directed at the deceased reader—her life predominantly through the lens of the tremulous and exultant relationship with the complex rendered dead. The definition of unflinching really, since it’s as much about characterizing the narrator as it is him, Thomas, now 4 years gone. covering night-life, nightclubs, bedrooms, sex, sexy dialogue, queerness, fabulous flamboyant “dirty bastards’, love, loss, Lisa Minnelli humor, affections, humiliation, flaunted transfemininity,

It is now ten years since we met, six years since we last spoke, four years since your death, and I’m writing you this from Mexico City, under grave obligation. It is not a letter, since I know you cannot reply; maybe it’s another monologue, certainly it does not require a second voice; let’s call it plainsong then. This is the chant recalling your life, it is fiction, it is biography, it is a transfiguration. Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love. As well as some incredible moments of emotional clarity on the part of the narrator that speak so broadly and movingly to the nature of queerness itself: At Certain Points We Touch is a novel about remembering the past, doomed love, and a millennial stumble through friendship and cities, as a writer tries to tell the story of their dead lover. A trans writer living in Mexico realises that it is the anniversary of the death of a man they loved, and starts to write the story of them, together and apart, and the messy, toxic, desperate affair they had.Overall, while I wouldn't necessarily recommend the book, I'd definitely recommend the author, and I'm interested to see what they bring out next. A sweeping and shattering portrait of youth, friendship and first love, by an electrifying new voice

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