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Remember Me
Book by Huston, Bo
143 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1991
About the author
Bo Huston
7 books4 followersBo Huston was a columnist for the San Francisco Bay Times, and wrote reviews and articles, as well as fiction, for many other publications. He graduated from Hampshire College in 1980, published four books of fiction, and exhibited photographic pieces at several galleries.
More information: https://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/2...
More information: https://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/2...
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 20, 2022
I came across this author when a post was created for Bo Huston on the AIDS Memorial on Instagram. This book was supposed to be his best and it was quite well done, albeit a depressing read. Two people who are old friends are sharing a house. One is clinging very tenuously to sanity and the other is a PWA whose health is starting to cycle down. There is very little plot but a lot of nuanced interactions, making for a moving novella. It is set in a decaying Hudson River town and I saw similarities in location to Paul Russell. The book has been out of print for years and can be expensive. I found a copy on EBAY for $25.00.
October 1, 2023
Really just a perfectly sad book. About AIDS but also not about AIDS, about codependency but also about the complex existence it can lead to, gothic fiction but also something else. Just so so good
January 18, 2009
How could I ever forget you?
Your words, voice and stories are etched in my flesh. I miss you my friend. You are an incredible writer...gritty, truthful and never upbeat to make the reader feel better. I miss your stories.
Your words, voice and stories are etched in my flesh. I miss you my friend. You are an incredible writer...gritty, truthful and never upbeat to make the reader feel better. I miss your stories.
May 15, 2026
"A fascinating and touching study of an intimate, obsessive relationship. For all its subdued and sad elements, 'Remember Me' is a thoroughly hopeful and compelling story about the mysterious boundaries of friendship and love. This is one you'll want to read again." Dorothy Alinson author of 'Trash'.
"...Remember Me is a slim, lyrical novel set in a fictionalized Rhinebeck, New York, though Huston offers so few particulars that the setting could as easily be a provincial town in France. “This town is nestled between two small hills along the river,” Huston writes. “Patches of green and brown are threaded by the railroad tracks. The tiny houses, a steeple, a train station, a whitewashed flagpole in its center make it seem like a toy town that one need not take too seriously.”
"The unnamed narrator and his friend Charlotte have static lives, a static life together. They’ve known each other since childhood, and she nurses the scars on her legs from burns that were the narrator’s fault years earlier. This, plus her psychic aversion to dealing with the outside world—the noise and motion, the unfamiliar people—consigns her to day upon day at home, working on her “projects.” She bounces from poetry to short stories to collage, completing nothing she undertakes.
"...The narrator fares better in his attempts as a writer, but the small press interested in his novel goes out of business before he’s completed their recommended edits. Like Charlotte, he’s locked within himself by a mixture of personality, experience, and, in his case, socially stigmatized illness. He’s profoundly isolated, has almost no physical contact, even in memory. He has little emotional connection either, apart from Charlotte and their codependent bond.
"For all the darkness, though, and all the stasis, there’s something seductive about the voice, style, and slant of the narrator’s mind. The prose has the cadence of an elegant translation, the directness and definite pronouncements one might find in Marguerite Duras. And it is a translation of sorts, of the spectre of death, filtered through the sensibility of a young and previously healthy individual. The narrator’s illness is more a looming dread than a conglomeration of symptoms. When he has a serious health scare late in the novel, a sudden fever brought on by an infection that lands him in the hospital for several days, the episode reads as a sharp increase in the threat level he faces..." From the article: 'Remembering Bo Huston, Who Bore Witness to the Peak of the AIDS Crisis' by John McIntyre at: https://lithub.com/remembering-bo-hus....
Bo Huston famously said:
"I’d be thrilled to be known in fifty years’ time as a minor gay writer from the 1990s."
But he is much more than minor gay writer from the 1990s, he is a very good writer verging on the great who is not a 'gay' but a writer, and a writer for everyone because the worlds he creates and draws into are universal. The French would understand that because they have never really accepted that such a thing as a 'gay' writer or 'gay' artist existed. Different cultures, different times, maybe even different needs, but Bo Huston who died at 33 is an example of what a writer should be. Would he have he been greater had he lived - almost certainly, he definitely wouldn't have got worse - but his four books, produced in five years, stand as a reproach to all who complain of a lack of time.
He is writer to be read and savoured - he is unique, powerful and moving and I will be buying his other works very soon.
"...Remember Me is a slim, lyrical novel set in a fictionalized Rhinebeck, New York, though Huston offers so few particulars that the setting could as easily be a provincial town in France. “This town is nestled between two small hills along the river,” Huston writes. “Patches of green and brown are threaded by the railroad tracks. The tiny houses, a steeple, a train station, a whitewashed flagpole in its center make it seem like a toy town that one need not take too seriously.”
"The unnamed narrator and his friend Charlotte have static lives, a static life together. They’ve known each other since childhood, and she nurses the scars on her legs from burns that were the narrator’s fault years earlier. This, plus her psychic aversion to dealing with the outside world—the noise and motion, the unfamiliar people—consigns her to day upon day at home, working on her “projects.” She bounces from poetry to short stories to collage, completing nothing she undertakes.
"...The narrator fares better in his attempts as a writer, but the small press interested in his novel goes out of business before he’s completed their recommended edits. Like Charlotte, he’s locked within himself by a mixture of personality, experience, and, in his case, socially stigmatized illness. He’s profoundly isolated, has almost no physical contact, even in memory. He has little emotional connection either, apart from Charlotte and their codependent bond.
"For all the darkness, though, and all the stasis, there’s something seductive about the voice, style, and slant of the narrator’s mind. The prose has the cadence of an elegant translation, the directness and definite pronouncements one might find in Marguerite Duras. And it is a translation of sorts, of the spectre of death, filtered through the sensibility of a young and previously healthy individual. The narrator’s illness is more a looming dread than a conglomeration of symptoms. When he has a serious health scare late in the novel, a sudden fever brought on by an infection that lands him in the hospital for several days, the episode reads as a sharp increase in the threat level he faces..." From the article: 'Remembering Bo Huston, Who Bore Witness to the Peak of the AIDS Crisis' by John McIntyre at: https://lithub.com/remembering-bo-hus....
Bo Huston famously said:
"I’d be thrilled to be known in fifty years’ time as a minor gay writer from the 1990s."
But he is much more than minor gay writer from the 1990s, he is a very good writer verging on the great who is not a 'gay' but a writer, and a writer for everyone because the worlds he creates and draws into are universal. The French would understand that because they have never really accepted that such a thing as a 'gay' writer or 'gay' artist existed. Different cultures, different times, maybe even different needs, but Bo Huston who died at 33 is an example of what a writer should be. Would he have he been greater had he lived - almost certainly, he definitely wouldn't have got worse - but his four books, produced in five years, stand as a reproach to all who complain of a lack of time.
He is writer to be read and savoured - he is unique, powerful and moving and I will be buying his other works very soon.
January 7, 2026
Most coming-of-age novels are about the start of something. This one is about the end of something.
May 11, 2026
‘I know that death is merely a rumor. I pay it no mind. Disappearance is the real dilemma.’
From its stunning opening, to its hope-invested ending, Bo Huston’s extraordinary ‘Remember Me’ is both a plaint, and a command. A cry against the failure of memory, and the instruction to keep life as the foundation of memory. In this small novel, Huston introduces us to two of the most vivid, and completely original characters during the time of AIDS: David, a gay writer trying to comprehend the world and his place within it as he struggles with self-awareness, the vagaries of love and sex, and the growing fears of what is slowly darkening so much of the world that he knows. And there is Charlotte, his agoraphobic, acutely individual best friend as she too, tries to test the world’s conventions as she discards what she considers its untruths. Life-long friends, they are two of the most remarkable characters I have ever come across in fiction — yet a story completely mirroring the life of the author, in this his first novel, now reissued by The Library of Homosexual Congress/Rebel Satori Press. Bo Huston 'orchestrated his own exit on May 24th, 1993'. That this work is now with us again can be celebrated.
Huston presents a small-town community where David and Charlotte wrestle, often comically and always ardently, with its narrow confines, its frustrating conventions, and yet also its human frailty. As David seeks connection — or the possibility of love — among a series of chance meetings, and tries to write and publish his first novel, these characters suffuse his perceptions of what is important, what is to be feared, and how to work against that very idea of disappearance: the possible erasure of self, of being seen, and being loved. If death is indeed a rumor, David and Charlotte will work against its eventuality with constant living. Huston gives us some of the most beautiful, stark, and perceptive images here; the characters are all so perfectly wrought, that we believe in them without question. With clear and almost stark sentences, the novel moves us through its journey to David’s ultimate acceptance of who he is, and how he will continue to find strength and intention in a world so often fragile and fleeting. Charlotte and David are a bedrock against disappearance; a friendship so strong that memory becomes indelible. They pay rumor no mind.
Dan Carmell's beautiful Introduction provides a wonderful insight into Bo's life; partners for six years, he pays a tribute to Bo's work and commitment and journey. The many writers we have lost to AIDS, is so vast; the literature is a testament, and should be. We must keep their voices with us. Their work is how we remember them. Their stories have been our own.
From its stunning opening, to its hope-invested ending, Bo Huston’s extraordinary ‘Remember Me’ is both a plaint, and a command. A cry against the failure of memory, and the instruction to keep life as the foundation of memory. In this small novel, Huston introduces us to two of the most vivid, and completely original characters during the time of AIDS: David, a gay writer trying to comprehend the world and his place within it as he struggles with self-awareness, the vagaries of love and sex, and the growing fears of what is slowly darkening so much of the world that he knows. And there is Charlotte, his agoraphobic, acutely individual best friend as she too, tries to test the world’s conventions as she discards what she considers its untruths. Life-long friends, they are two of the most remarkable characters I have ever come across in fiction — yet a story completely mirroring the life of the author, in this his first novel, now reissued by The Library of Homosexual Congress/Rebel Satori Press. Bo Huston 'orchestrated his own exit on May 24th, 1993'. That this work is now with us again can be celebrated.
Huston presents a small-town community where David and Charlotte wrestle, often comically and always ardently, with its narrow confines, its frustrating conventions, and yet also its human frailty. As David seeks connection — or the possibility of love — among a series of chance meetings, and tries to write and publish his first novel, these characters suffuse his perceptions of what is important, what is to be feared, and how to work against that very idea of disappearance: the possible erasure of self, of being seen, and being loved. If death is indeed a rumor, David and Charlotte will work against its eventuality with constant living. Huston gives us some of the most beautiful, stark, and perceptive images here; the characters are all so perfectly wrought, that we believe in them without question. With clear and almost stark sentences, the novel moves us through its journey to David’s ultimate acceptance of who he is, and how he will continue to find strength and intention in a world so often fragile and fleeting. Charlotte and David are a bedrock against disappearance; a friendship so strong that memory becomes indelible. They pay rumor no mind.
Dan Carmell's beautiful Introduction provides a wonderful insight into Bo's life; partners for six years, he pays a tribute to Bo's work and commitment and journey. The many writers we have lost to AIDS, is so vast; the literature is a testament, and should be. We must keep their voices with us. Their work is how we remember them. Their stories have been our own.
May 10, 2026
An unnamed narrator dying of AIDS spends his final years living with Charlotte, his childhood best friend, who has withdrawn from the world outside. The novel is about the narrator trying to make sense of love, their friendship, his ambitions, guilt, mortality and life itself while his body slowly fails him.
Charlotte spends her time collecting newspaper clippings of crimes and framing pictures of serial killers around the house. This is an example of the oddly specific detailing through which Bo Huston has crafted the characters in this book : they are interesting, memorable and feel real.
The writing is dreamy and melancholic, full of moments where nothing 'happens' as such but tectonic plates shift emotionally. By the end it felt less like reading a story and more like spending time inside someone’s fading life and memories.
It gave me a sense of the quiet devastation that was the AIDs crisis in the 80s and 90s.
4.25/5.
Charlotte spends her time collecting newspaper clippings of crimes and framing pictures of serial killers around the house. This is an example of the oddly specific detailing through which Bo Huston has crafted the characters in this book : they are interesting, memorable and feel real.
The writing is dreamy and melancholic, full of moments where nothing 'happens' as such but tectonic plates shift emotionally. By the end it felt less like reading a story and more like spending time inside someone’s fading life and memories.
It gave me a sense of the quiet devastation that was the AIDs crisis in the 80s and 90s.
4.25/5.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews