About Ed

by Robert Glück

A moving story about love, AIDS, grief, and memory by one of the most adventurous writers to come out of San Francisco's LGBTQ+ scene.Bob Glück met Ed Aulerich-Sugai in 1970. Ed was an aspiring artist; Bob wanted to write. They were young men in San Francisco at the high tide of sexual liberation and soon, and for eight years, they were lovers, after which they were friends. Ed was an explorer in the realms of sex. He was beautiful, fragile, exasperating, serious, unassuaged. In 1994 he died of HIV. His dream notebooks became a touchstone for this book, which Glück has been working on for some two decades, while also making  his name as a proponent of New Narrative writing and as one of America’s most unusual, venturesome, and lyrical authors. About Ed is about Ed, who remains, as our dead do, both familiar and unknowable, faraway and close. It is about Bob too. The book is a hybrid, at once fiction and fact, like memory, and it takes in many things through tales of political activism and domestic comedy and fury to questions of art and love and experiences of  longing and horror. The book also shifts in register, from the delicate  to the analytic, to funny and explicit and heartbroken. It begins in the  San Francisco of the early 1980s, when Ed and Bob have been broken up for a while. aIds is spreading, but Ed has yet to receive his diagnosis.  It follows him backward through his life with Bob in the 1970s and forward through the harrowing particulars of death. It holds on to him and explores his art. It ends in his dreams.

Genres: Memoir, Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT, Biography, Gay, Literature

254 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 14, 2023

About the author

Born in Cleveland, poet, fiction writer, editor, and New Narrative theorist Robert Glück grew up there and in Los Angeles. He was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Edinburgh, the College of Art in Edinburgh, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a BA. He also studied writing in New York City workshops with poet Ted Berrigan and earned an MA at San Francisco State University.

With Bruce Boone and other writers, Glück co-founded the New Narrative movement in San Francisco in the early 1980s. Glück’s experimental work—typically prose—infuses L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theory with queer, feminist, and class-based discourse while exploring issues of autobiography and self. In his essay “Long Note on New Narrative,” which appeared in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004), Glück stated, “We were thinking about autobiography; by autobiography we meant daydreams, nightdreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistencies and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history and language.”

Glück’s poetry includes the collection Reader (1989) and, with Bruce Boone, the collaboration La Fontaine (1981). His fiction includes the story collection Denny Smith (2003) and the novels Jack the Modernist (1995) and Margery Kempe (1994). Glück’s work has been selected for numerous anthologies, including The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction (1992), Best American Erotica 2005, and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (2006). He has received a California Arts Council Fellowship and a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant.

Glück has served as director of San Francisco State’s Poetry Center, codirector of the Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and editor for Lapis Press and the literary journal Narrativity. He lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Want to scream from street corners/rooftops/mountains about this book. One of the most beautiful devastating things I’ve ever read, an experimental quasi-memoir about Robert Glück’s first love and best friend who died of AIDS in 1994, but also a live account of Glück writing through his grief (he’s been writing this in bits and pieces since Ed died) and Glück, now in his late-70s, coming to term with his own eventual death. Almost all of it is written in this opaque poetic form that (corny a cliché as it is!) feels like a secret code between him and me, everything making crystal clear emotional sense even when it didn’t make literal sense. The final section— Ed’s dream journal in reverse chronological order, from his last writing before dying back to the day he and Robert met on the bus— seems tedious until you understand where it’s going, and the final image is just so moving, an honest attempt to resurrect the dead. I am always on the hunt for books this vulnerable and compassionate and deeply felt and I never find them! Not to get ahead of myself but I can see myself coming back to this again and again as I get older and try to understand it with different eyes as I (god forbid) experience grief and loss on this level.

“Mourning is the fear of losing Ed combined with the fact of losing Ed. I can’t work it out and the problem shackles me. I see why doctors suggest travel, because I can’t find a different place inside— intolerable rigidity. I console myself: I never have to accept his death. Do I write to remain in contact? —when I’m finished will he truly be buried?”

“With posthumous simplicity, Ed says, ‘If it weren’t for my body I could go on forever.’”

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning and devastating and gorgeous and wise - About Ed is a grief book encrusted with several decades of mourning, remembering, observing one's own grief and remembering, questioning the project of writing about grief and remembering - inhabiting the lost loved one through imagination and dream. There's something about how Gluck finds Ed's spirit in the quotidian - and in language - that achieves something like the sublime. And yet it's a humble, painful, not-at-all precious book. An extraordinary work.

[karina · Rating 4 out of 5]

there were some truly beautiful moments in this book. i enjoyed the first half more than the second half i’d say, and there are some lines that i think will stick with me for a long time. had a nightmare after finishing it before bed lol.

“I watched the grass rise after his bare foot pressed it.” what a declaration of love

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among the most moving reading experiences I’ve ever had. A captivatingly honest expression of aggrieved love—devastating, obviously, but never for its own sake. Associative, abstract, and digressive, too, but this is New Narrative… if you don’t like it, take your sensitive ass back to The Best American Short Stories…

A book like this wouldn’t be a book like this if Robert Glück wasn’t one of the greatest living writers in the English language, though, so don’t take this as a blanket endorsement of all metatextual autofiction. I’ve seen the underbelly of that genre (took fiction workshops at N*U)—as with all things, there are levels!

[oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What can I write for Ed? The question puts faith on the café table with the mealy apple and chopped orange, meager allegory garden of decay and orderly renewal. Scale falls off the map: To die and return from the grave.”

Strangely lovely is the word that comes to mind of this one, even though it wasn't really - often grotesque or frustrating or strange. Lots to say about time, love, language, longing, dreaming.

[Lars Meijer · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘My life’s sole aim is to hide my own weakness from myself, but my weakness is the way into the world.’

[Troy]

i’ve probably overused the word “kaleidoscopic” to describe prose these days, but for this memoir, it is an accurate descriptor. glück is such a unique prose stylist, i’m so curious to pick up his other work after reading this.

the writing is breathtaking: so sensually rich, surreal and dreamlike, but somehow still grounded to earth and realism. glück built this monument of a work for his former lover and friend who died young due to aids complications. the story he weaves about ed is also very much about him and his life as well. just stunning.

[Jordan B. Kaplan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really loved the synopsis on the back but was a bit too abstract at times. Sometimes the abstraction really worked for me some times it just distracted me but what do I know

[ZeeMi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fearless, powerful writing. The early pages were especially compelling. The latter stuff I found tough going. This proved to be an easy book to start, and a very, very difficult one to finish.

[Steven Nolan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate to give a gay book one star. I really do! But I mean it. Grotesque and structurally confusing without much depth (at least IMO)

[Aaron Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

Alternative title: Sometimes About Ed

[Braiden Ellis · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first foray into New Narrative, and a very experimental read for me. While I started out really confused, I ended up being really touched by a lot of moments in this book, specifically the middle section that chronicles Bob taking care of Ed and Bob's feelings about Ed's condition. I think grief throughout this section is expressed in such a unique and heart wrenching way, and I found myself reading over certain lines over and over because I felt like I needed to glean everything I could from these beautiful phrases.

That being said, I did struggle with this book a decent amount, as so much felt digressive in a way that was purely distracting to me rather than being demonstrative of Bob or Ed. The last section really threw me for a loop as well, being a series of dreamlike images that I struggled to keep up with or really see the connection. Overall, though, I would still say that I enjoyed the read and would dip my toes into New Narrative again.

[Mark Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mannnn this was heart wrenching. Some lines in this one will stick with me for a long time.

Such an interesting structure, Glück constructs an emotionally charged epitaph for Ed; richly coloured and technically complex. The New Narrative conventions worked really well for this book, with the central section captivating me with it's fusion of memoir and introspective commentary.

The final section, Ed's dream journal was the showstopper. Once you start this section, you can't put it down, with it tumbling forward with such dense imagery it overwhelms the senses. Lines of terror, eroticism, and sheer beauty made Ed's dreams come to life. The reverse chronological order just perfects this emotional sucker punch of text.

Emotionally, this was draining. Reading about the HIV/AIDS crisis is tough, and Glück's poetic voice just added to the emotional intensity.

Highly, highly recommend this one.

[Christie Bane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh, yuck. I could not stand this book. It took great effort to get through it. I was expecting a memoir about the loss of a lover to HIV, but this was so confusing it was nearly impossible to follow. The voice switched back and forth between the author and his dead lover, often without any warning. The author is a poet too, and I don’t know when I will learn that I should NOT read books by poets because too often their non-poems have too much poetry in them. Also, can we talk about what the hell was that last chapter about? Basically it seemed to be about genitals and excrement with a little bit of gory death on the side. I think it was either in the author’s head, or else a dream, or maybe an LSD experience. But no matter what it was supposed to be, it was 20% of the book that was damn near unreadable, and it caused me to drop my rating from a generous 3 to a (still generous) 2.

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A spiritually opening book, because most books about death are actually about life, a holding place for memories, the body is close again, text is physical and psychic. Robert/Bob’s language is unendingly surprising yet true, descriptive to the point of abstraction, and not afraid of nakedness. This is what literature is to me: what the human experience really feels like, the cracking of sensation. Ed’s dream journals at the end are supernatural (sexual) other-worlds, like a playground. To read them straight through is to be in a dream. The decision to end the book with 50 pages of Ed’s dreams was so jaw dropping and also made the most sense in the world. About Ed. “Is the earth as full as life was full, of them?”

“Is the body a crime against time? Is it death’s trophy?” “Is all life a distraction? From a condition too simple to believe?”

[guille]

aunque la última parte me ha dado más igual y la he leído un poco en diagonal (son al fin y al cabo 60 páginas de descripciones de sueños) es un ejercicio brutal y revelador de juntar veinte años de escritura sobre el duelo de una de las formas más lúcidas que he leído nunca. una vez que uno supera que al fin y al cabo está leyendo a uno de los creadores de la new narrative se encuentra aquí con capas y capas de inteligencia, precisión y humanidad.

Sickening tears, because the shape of Ed's life had become apparent. This flat for now, this city for now, this job for now, these friends for now, this lover for now, this art for now- in one stroke he became the life he lived, the irreversible shape. I couldn't change it.

[kinsbot · Rating 4 out of 5]

If i could give it a 4.5 I would. This book was as choppy and unreliable as it should have been considering what grief is like. Yet at the same time there was so much love and little moments of joy and clarity that would recenter me, like Oh yeah. This is who they were.

-.5 because the ending felt like a blind rollercoaster. That’s what dreams are like I suppose

[baruch]

really loved the first half and struggled to get through the second

[Maya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bob and I sit face forward on a small bus! i touch him every chance I get! Our fingers curl, their tips meet, we are doing a secret thing!

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es imposible poner en palabras lo que bien que se traslada el caos, cariño y dependencia de estas personas

[India · Rating 2 out of 5]

Prob like 2.5 but wasn’t moved as much as I feel like I should’ve been. The amount of care and love comes through but wasn’t ultimately a compelling read to me

[blake · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a constellation of death, but somehow it’s not as morbid as that sounds. Though the book’s title suggests the entirety of its pages will center around Ed’s death, Glück explores several of the deaths he’s witnessed in adulthood. In doing so, the process of dying becomes a unique form of embodiment, rivaled only by sex. Grounded in his lover’s dream journal, Glück weaves a dreamlike reading experience that felt outside of both time and space. As I read, I had the sense of sifting through his psyche and the chaotic places that memories took him. There’s quite a bit of abstraction in this book, some of which I enjoyed but at other times, I couldn’t quite find my way out.

———————————————————————————

“He followed the prescribed behavior with a conviction that resembled faith in an afterlife, which doesn't give much to the dying except to structure the experience of death. Mac's illness existed for the hospital, his death belonged to the nurses and doctors and the world beyond… No, it's Ed's awareness of death in the midst of life that aroused me and that made doctors recoil, negating them as it does. The sudden friendship with a corpse shocked me. Mac was a ledge to jump off. I hadn't meant to see anything so alien. Nothing nothing nothing is more unlikely —not hell or rising from the dead or bardo states or the Isles of the Blessed-nothing is more fantastic than for someone you love to stop, just stop, and be lowered into a hole and covered with concrete and actual dirt.”

“As for ordering my tomb, over the two dates put an image of men fucking— to show what made me happy.”

“What do I have to say? It's still the eighties: I feel so intensely the party is happening elsewhere that you could call my distraction a disease. That is, I feel like I'm reading a bad translation, knowing that a better one exists. Distance installs itself in me, from thrillingly difficult technical vocabularies to the ascendancy of the grid on, say, Calvin Klein sheets. Distance replaces the excesses and heartfelt essences of the seventies.”

“A revolution occurred in the way I valued my childhood. The good child is actually the unknown child. Attention exists only in conflict. imagined I was a princess because I was never scolded. After a while, I held myself apart. I am afraid of falling into the past, and my parents offer an emptiness to justify my vertigo. Even when I was a boy I resented the way childhood shaped expectations. A hellish inner force drove other boys around playgrounds and parks, and this was supposed to prepare them. I never subscribed to that faith: to pursue the ball and believe the game.”

“Old relationships maintain their failings, even as new relationships are conducted with more generosity on firmer ground. Are relationships time capsules? With Ed I get to be my young self even as we age, our interactions retain the Bob that was his lover.”

“This elegant silvery woman had a banal family problem. She threw out her hands with the fresh surprise of the badly loved. I didn't want to see her point of view because I didn't want to see life that way.”

“It was oddly like visiting my own dreams or hearing my own voice. If Ed goes inside me, what then? Will his spirit manifest? Will we cohabitate? Can he go inside you? Can you go inside them, Reader? Lost in his dreams? Hidden in his dreams? They are a kind of heaven-not a heaven that culminates in an image that explains a life, but a heaven of endless narration where image replaces image… Loneliness creates an excess of self, so there was always more to give away.”

“First sexual experiences shape one's sexuality because they give expression to all sexual need. What about an encounter that could be the last? Fear gathered around my arousal.”

[Michael Gabrielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

“…because the shape of Ed’s life had become apparent. This flat for now, this city for now, this job for now, these friends for now, this lover for now, this art for now—in one stroke he became the life he lived, the irreversible shape. I couldn’t change it.” (189). There is a vividness and a physicality to dreams that the dreamer experiences that is simply impossible to translate in a story—it’s why hearing people recount their dreams is, to me, so incredibly dull lol. This book was not (entirely) dull, but I constantly felt like I was on the outside of something extremely meaningful to the author. The stream of consciousness, new narrative style makes it really hard to follow or understand—huge swaths feel like just jumbles of words, very emphatic and beautiful language that actually means close to nothing to someone who does not have the context that the author has. I could spend the whole day trying to interpret the meaning of each individual sentence, an exercise in dedication that the author has clearly pursued in his own decades-long excavation of his lover’s life and journals, but that I don’t have the same drive to do. I do deeply appreciate the concept on some level—as a reader, we truly are on the outside of this relationship and experience—but, it makes it not that fun or compelling or inviting to read about, to feel on the outside for almost 300 pages. Especially the last section, which appears to be lifted directly from Ed’s dream notebooks. I’m happy for the author and for Ed that this story of love and life and grief was able to be preserved in publication, but it feels like it’s really just for the two of them. I’m not hugely into experimental writing styles though, so in that sense I think I’m really just not the target audience for this one. I am deeply the target audience though for emotional gay stories, and I enjoyed some snippets—the way the authors handled the section around Ed’s death was truly stunning, a really beautiful and heartbreaking recounting.

[Ryan]

I was really looking forward to this, but was quite disappointed. I didn't quite grasp the "experimental" description on this until I started reading it, and a litany of sexual partners and experiences for 200 pages, it turns out, isn't that interesting. This is something I've noticed in memoirs by gay men of a certain age - there seems to be this idea that entire books dedicated to reveling in how much sex they had is somehow interesting or compelling. I'm not anti-sex at all, but a little of that goes a long way for me. Cleve Jones and Reinaldo Arenas immediately come to mind when I think about this.

There are kernels of what I think are interesting and engaging storylines here, but the segmented nature, as well as shifting viewpoints, really don't do it for me. I'm come to realize about myself I'm just not a fan of this type of writing. Some people are, and if that's you, you'll probably really enjoy this book.

The last thing I'll say is that the last 50 pages of this book are a run-on, stream of consciousness rambling that's incoherent and boring and full of fantastical imagery that just didn't do it for me. I definitely skimmed this part just to get to the end.

[Justin Little · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Glück’s writing style. He so vividly describes his thoughts and emotions navigating Ed’s life, Ed’s death & his life after Ed. This book characterizes the disease into a dark cloud over the head of two free-spirited people & adds so much color & detail to their story. The anecdotal Notes for a Novel were sometimes a little unnecessary, and as poetic as they were, the dreams & stream of consciousness parts were too, but I enjoyed reading them. Visceral & intimate.

[Anna-Lena Dressman · Rating 4 out of 5]

a searing dreamscape. unrequited and sometimes requited love. san francisco in the onset of the AIDS crisis. this book both felt like a distant fever dream and an ice cold bucket of sheet vulnerability.

[John Treat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth the Wait

Gluck is the author of the great book JACK THE MODERNIST, but in ABOUT ED I thought his talents were being wasted— until I got to the last, long chapter narrated by Ed. It may be the greatest eulogy for a gay man ever written.

[Lydia Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

aghh it's tough to come to much of a conclusive end point with this one. where I'm satisfied with what I've read and what I feel about it. it's a deeply personal text with the occasional passage that absolutely floored me ("Death is too serious. I hug Ed and I want to say /I love you/ but choke on the words as though I'm lying (I'm not)." but it's assembled in a way that kept me held at distance. I admire Gluck's apparent "new narrative" approach, and I don't necessarily mind the non-linear structure, but this, to me, inherently worked best when approached as relatively straight-forward auto/biography. captures so much of So Much. the frequent obsessions with sex, with cocks, with orgasms, never feel irrelevant. easy to imagine that Ed himself would approve. the ghost of AIDS (and thus the ghosts of all the gay men and more who died of AIDS) haunt this book. but I liked reading, as the title might suggest, About Ed. even his slow and sickly decline, as morbid as it occasionally gets. it's tender. and there's lots of love for him still despite all the years since his passing, despite all the awkwardness their relationship might have had. but, unfortunately, as a reader, I'm ultimately left in that respect-more-than-like limbo I think. it's not an easily readable book in a number of ways and really felt like something of an obstacle, especially compared to the majority of this year's reads so far -- only The Last Temptation of Christ seems to have been a greater challenge (to far greater, more obvious, success).
wouldn't hesitate to recommend though.
deeply moving in spite of everything, as I've suggested. moving and sparked tearing up more than once. I think 4 stars is, after everything else I've said, probably the fairest end point I'm gonna get to. GOD I'd love to rate it higher. I have to be selfish though.

[William Tarnell · Rating 3 out of 5]

So much of this book was lyrical and bracing and beautiful. Gluck's style (referred to as "new narrative", although I can't really glean a cohesive set of rules that inform that movement from this writing) works well for 80% of the book. It's the last ~45 pages that left me really disappointed.

I don't think this merits hiding, because there can't really be spoilers in this mode, but if you are reading for structure over content I suppose stop here. Ending the book with a 45 page dream journal I don't think did this any great service. How much of this is taken from real life? How much is fabricated? Most importantly, what end is served by the inclusion of these dreams? The more I consider this choice, the more I am convinced that it does a disservice to the beautiful work that precedes it.

This book has been marketed somewhere between autofiction and memoir. In either case the dream journal feels ill-chosen. If this autofiction--that is, if the text is largely invented--then plonking down the last act in a grotesque, freewheeling dream sequence is a big Choice. A choice I really dislike in concept and execution, and one which feels like a lazy avoidance of the good old work of in narrative characterization. If this is memoir--that is, if the dreams related here are taken from the deceased "Ed's" journals--then the inclusion of these dreams feels very morally questionable. So much of the book has related the narrator/Gluck's own experience w/r/t "Ed" and to end by betraying the deepest contents of "Ed's" subconscious feels like a choice that really betrays their trust.

[Olivia]

something i am learning is i really do not care for reading published dream journals. this was why i couldn't finish that david wojnarowicz book, because i really just don't get the point of publishing them, it's just not interesting to me. this is the only reason why i'm not giving this book five stars and i feel bad for saying it because structurally the dream journal choice is great, it's fresh, it's unclear how much of it is ed's/bob's transcription/version of ed's work, it's beautiful, it's nice to give ed a chance to speak for "himself" - then again if it's even ed - but i ended up skimming because just 50 pages of random images are not interesting to me, even though the rest of this book was so moving, so compelling, so brilliant.

but yes the rest of this book was brilliant, i love the way that robert gluck writes about intimacy, i love his frankness about him and ed's relationship, the way it spans so many years and so many forms of love, intimacy, care, reciprocity. just really so lovely. their artist relationship was cool to read about and the honesty with which bob gluck discusses the difficulty of writing this book, his selfishness around ed and ed's death, is just so admirable and refreshing and so much of what i love love love about new narrative and keeps me coming back to it. i just can't with the dream journals. but then again that part of the book was clearly not for me and was a labor of love for bob. i just didn't want to read it. but that's also because the rest of the book was endlessly compelling, interesting, and well written that i just wanted more of that. gorgeous, sad, and so hopeful.