What I Did Wrong: A Novel

by John Weir

Returning to Manhattan, haunted by memories of friends who died from AIDS, middle-aged English professor Tom questions his own sexual identity while watching the demonstrations of confusion and bravado among the young men in his classes. By the author of The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket. 20,000 first printing.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Gay Fiction, Gay

272 pages, Hardcover

First published March 23, 2006

About the author

John Weir (born 8 February 1959 in Tarrytown, New York) is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket (HarperCollins, 1989), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction at the 2nd Lambda Literary Awards in 1990, and for which he received an NEA Fellowship in Fiction in 1991; and What I Did Wrong (Viking, 2006).

In the early 1990s, he was a Contributing Editor at Details; and he has published nonfiction in The New York Times, Spin, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. His short fiction has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, and elsewhere.

In 1991, in conjunction with ACT UP New York's Day of Desperation action to draw attention to government and media neglect of the global AIDS crisis, Weir and several fellow activists interrupted The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.

Weir is associate professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, where he has taught English and Creative Writing since 1993, and where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation.

His story collection Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me won the 2020 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and was published by Red Hen Press in 2022.

Reviews

[Sofia]

Reading with Ije & Maya - 9th Dec 15

[Wendell · Rating 4 out of 5]

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[Maya]

DNF @53%

Buddy read with Ije and Sofia - Dec 9, 2015.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, I loved it. Geworfenheit on a stick and deliciously so. But I'd be the first to admit that if a reader isn't fond of pondering the nature of one's being-in-the-world through a holocaust or a post-modern wasteland, it might not be an easy to get out of What I Did Wrong what's there to be got. It's not laid out there on a platter; the reader has to participate in the process.

I felt rewarded. The dog-biscuit rewards (loveable characters, fantasy situations) are not in play. That was kind of a relief to me. How nice to be in a place I'll never inhabit among characters I'll never know and find that they and I share some common ground.

Along the way there are some painfully funny vignettes, snippets of cinéma vérité, and quite a few interesting observations about what it is to be human in a completely bizarre world.

[Ije the Devourer of Books · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well I am unsure whether Tom actually did anything wrong.

I am not a great fan of literary fiction. More often than not such writing leaves me with ambiguity and questions. The main question being 'what did I just read?'

I am not sure what I have just read in this story. We have a main character called Tom who is gay. Tom has had a few boyfriends the most memorable of whom was Zack who died after a difficult struggle with Aids. This relationship wasn't smooth and delightful but troubling and critical and six years later Tom still lives with the voice of Zack in his life.

But Tom doesn't only live with voices, he lives with memories. Memories of growing up gay and being hounded and bullied at school, but still finding his way through school accepting the bullying as something that happens. Tom lives with the memories of his first steady relationship with a closeted older man called Mark who owned every aspect of Tom's life except when Tom found his place through writing.

And Tom has had other friendhips such as Richie, a childhood friend who pops into his life now and again. Different voices and memories have shaped Tom and now in his forties he is shaped by the younger men who he teaches in college and he has a relationship with one of them, Justin.

And that's about it. We are taken through a rather rambling dialogue about things Tom did in the past and things he is doing now. We relive his difficult time at school, his difficult time as Zack dies from Aids and his friendships as he kind of passes through life. The story shows the impact and horror of dying from Aids without being horrifying. Zack's illness and death are portrayed in a matter of fact way and so is Tom's time at school. He sees the bullying and ridicule from both teachers and students in a very matter of fact way, almost as if it is happening to someone else.

But after reading this all I could think of was 'and so?'

We never really got to understand how all these relationships and events shaped the man that Tom now is. Instead I was left wondering what it is that I just read??

But it isn't all bad because that question leads us to freedom. We may or may not understand what the author is trying to convey but we have the freedom to say what the story means to us.

For me this story is about memories and experiences of the past. It is about how these memories become echoes and voices and sounds in our present. So Tom continues to hear Zack's voice in his present and he continues to reflect on his experiences of school even though he is now in his forties.

Memories can be good or bad or neutral. Sometimes those voices from the past can speak in the present in a way that is hurtful or healing. Sometimes the voices and memories take a different shape and leave the authenticity of the past to become something new in the present. This is a story about living with memories; good, bad, painful, traumatic and then one day waking up to find that the memory has changed and is really a different voice in the present.

And of course we continue to live with those memories old and new. We continue to be shaped and influenced by the past and the present.

So in some way I have answered my question and I know what the story is about for me but I cant say it was a pleasurable read. It was truly a perplexing one.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Within three chapters I found it necessary to add "Complete This Book" to my list of chores. (For what it's worth, it was placed between Clean Out The Fridge and Scrub The Shower.) I found the story-telling disjointed (not artfully so) and peppered with inconsistencies. But it was the tone - suffused with thinly-veiled bitterness and self-loathing- that did me in.

[Alvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The total is less than the sum of its parts, but there are some terrific parts. Especially pertinent for Peter Pan-ish gay guys who've survived The Plague and are now facing/enduring that dreaded monster, Middle Age.

[Lyman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skip this book and read his "The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket"

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Find this and my other reviews at http://www.ordinarycanary.com.

I feel a bit strange writing a review of John Weir's What I Did Wrong, as he writes extensively about being a professor at Queens College, which is where I met him when I sat in his class for the first time. Coming to the novel as both a character and a reader was an interesting experience, though certainly this is a book that would have stayed with me for a long time even if I hadn't known the author.

A memory: years ago, shortly after the publication of What I Did Wrong, some friends and I went to a reading at the LGBT Community Center in New York. We met with our professor, who was looking rather scandalously disheveled for someone about to make a professional appearance. Yet he'd arrived prepared -- he brandished his razor and shaving cream as concrete proof of his preparedness. We all shuffled together into the multi-stall unisex bathroom and kept him company as he shaved and brushed down his shirt for errant wrinkles and crumbs, patted down his hair, then asked if he looked presentable enough.

You'll do, we said, nodding and grinning in amusement at the whole experience -- the inversion of the roles of teacher and student, adult and youth. Although we only were in each others' lives for a brief time, a semester or two, I can't think of him without thinking of that openness of spirit that welcomed us backstage into the writer's life. Is that what an author is? Someone who brings along his new friends to watch him shave two minutes before going on stage to read heart-wrenchingly vivid sections of his new novel? So when Weir writes in What I Did Wrong that his narrator Tom is "trying to be the first nice American man" and describes his deep love for his students, I had a difficult time separating professor Tom from the professor I knew.

John Weir is a very nice man indeed. That's only one reason why you should read his books.

On the surface, What I Did Wrong follows Tom through one manic night. He meets up with his childhood friend Richie, who is planning on cheating on his long-term girlfriend with a woman that he met online that calls herself Afrodytea. Tom is thrown into memories -- one might even argue that he lives more in memory than the present -- and we quickly learn that he is absorbed by the death of his friend Zack, who died of AIDS five years prior to the action of the novel. Zack, intensely acerbic and angry, turns into Tom's alter ego, forcing him to answer difficult questions about his feelings for his student Justin Innocenzio, who turns to Tom as a mentor in his budding passion for writing poetry. That's the plot, but the plot is the least of the novel.

Nose to the ground, squat on its haunches, Riche's car is blister red, bright with sleek aluminum strips, swollen here and there in its tapering length with triumphant attachments, swiveling mirrors, trim antennae, delicate bumpers, and terraced with glass that reflects and multiplies in its windshields and side windows every passing jazz-juiced hipster crossing Avenue A against the gun-metal blue of the cloud-clotted sky.

Weir is really brilliant in his imagery and his character writing, with descriptions that take your breath away in their depth and beauty. Even when he describes the end of Zack's life, when Zack is emaciated and out of control of his body and Tom is horrified by the physical reality of the indignities of the dying, his love for his friends shine through. We spend the novel watching Tom watch his friends, and the predominant emotion is always love.

She's sitting on the bar stool near the door, twisting her slender Audrey Hepburn neck to see what's playing above her on the TV screen. Her pale arms are naked to the shoulder, bent at the elbows and balancing her face, her hands together palm to palm beside her cheek, the first two fingers of her right hand stretching out to hold a cigarette. Its smoke turns colors as it moves through overlapping shafts of bar light and TV light and rings her black hair like a corona.

Half meditation on American masculinity and half meditation on what it is to love -- your best friend, your student, the city that you live in, your dying friend -- What I Did Wrong is full of food for thought. Tom frequently asks what it means to be a man attracted to men, to be both the desirer and the object of desire, while mourning the devastation that the AIDS epidemic of the late 80s brought to his community and indulging in no small amount of survivor guilt. At the same time, he puts American masculinity under the knife, using his identity as a gay man -- in his iteration, this is somewhere between male and female -- to critique it.

Because how much does a man have in his life? You can't invent the wheel. That's been done. Prometheus took care of fire. And women are better at everything else: plans and provisions, legal precedents, corporate accounts,. Foreplay. Women connect. Men are selfish dreamers, in the john with their Walkmans spinning Radiohead and counting all the geniuses they can't become: Homer, Plato, Jesus, Gandhi, Lester Young, Malcolm X, Frank Purdue.

And yet, while the novel's famous phrase is that "America is a place where everyone has a bad relationship with a man," Weir's critique of masculinity is as nuanced as his character portraits -- it is observation, beautifully described, and an attempt to understand. And through it all is the love that binds his characters together.

"Yes, zoom!" Kerouac says, and we're on the Belt Parkway. A belt is a fist in the arm, a shot of booze, a part of your car. We cross the border into Brooklyn, where the ground is flat and sandy near Starrett City and the highway changes names from Shore Parkway to Leif Ericson Drive. The Verazanno Narros Bridge glides into place like a zipper joining oiled waves, and Manhattan is behind it. "There it is," Richie says, "there it motherfucking is!"

The end of What I Did Wrong came too soon for me -- I wanted to keep reading the lush language that brought my city and its characters so clearly to life. There's a reason why artists congregate here -- Weir is certainly one of them.

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book when I got it at the library. I too experienced first hand the same things the main character did in the novel; friends dying, facing middle age, questioning my life. Sadly the story just didn't grab me, I found myself not caring about any of the characters or their troubles. I reached a point where what kept me reading the book was finding passages where the narrator names the streets and neighborhoods as he passes through them. The bike ride to the Bronx, and the various car trips in Queens come to mind. I think the author got them right! Now that I've finished it my first reaction is disappointment. I give it two stars; it was okay. Just.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit of a cheat, as I started it in 2017 in a flu daze, then put it down halfway through, with a need for more fantastical words and worlds. Back to it, this book should be more readily in print. A melancholy humorous ode to an era of gay survivors in the early 2000’s, the amazing and quirky bonds between gay and straight male friends, and a love letter to NY writers and teachers. There’s a class consciousness rare in a queer novel. Also I finished it on Memorial Day weekend, setting of the book.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me encantó! Lo encontré de casualidad y fue una sorpresa genial. Duro en muchos momentos pero necesario

[Andrew Grunow · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book What I Did Wrong, written by John Weir, shows readers that there is no positive side to depending on someone for your own satisfaction in life. The book is a realistic fiction piece, written through the eyes of a gay man in New York right after the AIDS epidemic. The main character, Tom, is as forty-something year old college professor who is often less organized and timely than his students. Tom has witnessed multiple lovers and friends slowly die a painful death. The story focuses on Tom’s current lover and his first real love. The book is often written as a flashback, comparing the past to the present. The title of the book suggests that Tom is battling with some personal demons, regarding whether he had done all he could in his past relationship.
Tom is currently in a relationship with one of his students, Justin. Justin is a twenty five year old man, reminiscent of Tom’s late lover, Zack. It is slightly confusing whom Tom is talking about throughout the book, as many names are dropped and broad statements are made. In my opinion, the negative tones of regret and death are too prevalent. It almost feels like the author is trying too hard to make the book more negative than it has to be. For the first half of the book, all you hear about is death and stories of all of these people that Tom knew before they die. It’s extremely interesting what Tom tells about each death. He always talks about what he learned from each individual death and what he learned from all of the deaths together.
The book altogether shows the effect AIDS has on individuals and communities. The only effect really shown throughout the book was death and, in turn, despair. As you read, you’ll feel heartbroken at first for Tom. Towards the end, you’ll start to feel numb towards the idea of death. This, you will learn from Tom who is extremely numb to anything other than anger. If you plan on reading this, know that it is a bit morbid in thought. It’s a wonderfully written piece, but it is a large commitment to finish. If I were to give it a rating, I would give it a 3.5 out of 5. The idea is interesting and carried out effectively, however it runs on a bit long. I would definitely read this book again in the future if given the opportunity, in hopes to further appreciate it with my gained maturity and wisdom.

[Julene · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fast read that I enjoyed very much. Loved how he portrayed Queens, NYC, AIDS during the late 80s early 90s, and the story of a gay boy growing into a man with true complexity. During his harassment scenes I wanted to cry. Same with scenes of connection with men which were fraught with underlying fear. Lots of fade away scenes from the present into the past providing the story of the man he loved, but wasn't lovers with, who died from AIDS. Sometimes the fade away scenes seemed too long and digressive and I wanted to get back to the story. But they always did tie in by the end.

Lots of literary references, the main character Tom is a Creative Writing teacher at Queens College. He writes, "Queens is the land of missing fathers." I loved how he writes about Queens "assembling substance from surfaces of this city." And refers to to it as having "horizontal depth." It is a view of my teenage home, close and surrounding areas, but not the neighborhood I inhabited.

[Tejas Desai · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Weir was my professor when I was doing my MFA in Creative Writing-Fiction. I read this book when I was living in Boston before I did my MFA, and I'm pretty sure I finished it in two days. A captivating read from start to finish, the book is extremely well-written and evokes NYC. Weir's sentences are superb and I'd say they are his strength and his greatest talent, but the narrative structure is also stellar. The characters are vivid though the story is simple. My main criticism is the title--typically for this type of book published my major publishers, I have no idea what it has to do with the content of this book, and I doubt that was the original title. All-in-all, a great read.

[LARRY · Rating 2 out of 5]

As posted in [http://www.amazon.com]:

Tom is a gay professor at a college in New York City. He reconnects with an old childhood friend, Ritchie. Ritchie, then, begs him to join him as he has set up an upcoming date with an Internet friend.

Meanwhile, Tom has a platonic relationship with a "bi" student, whom he guides through about life using a series of poetry.

Between Ritchie and his student, Tom flashes back in his life to his younger days with Ritchie and a dear friend, Zach, who has since died from AIDS.

Contemplation and redemption is constant throughout the novel. Simply, a yawn.

[cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there was a choice for 3.5 stars that's what it would get. I really did like it. A student from my Gay & Lesbian Lit class recommended and gave it to me. It was very readable, not too literary, which was what they said of Autobigraphy of Red and Written on the Body- "not straight forward enough." Well this one's straight forward: It's about what it's really like to be gay growing up, well sort of, more like having friends die of AIDS and looking back. Lots of literary and music references, almost makes it too self-conscious, but still, it was fun. Good summer read. Summer meaning you don't want to think cause it's too hot to think and you might be drunk.

[Alistair · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes I think I should rate books on how long it takes me to read them. Fast read = good book. What I did wrong didnt take me long, but I have reservations. There is a sub-genre of fiction that has as its protagonist a gay man of middle years, rueing the past, uncertain about the future and what direction to take, and spending an inordinate amount of time, well, just ruminating. So whilst this effort is smoothly written, the fate of English professor Tom didnt keep me awake at night. Toms best friend Zack has been dead 10 years but remains the person Tom talks to most, and his current obsession is one of his students, 20 years younger and straight. I felt like shouting, Tom get a life!

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm enjoying this for the emotions it evokes about growing gay but being made to faulty without anyone really acknowledging what was going on. Little things about this novel bother me. Like saying Paul Castellano was murdered in a restaurant in Little Italy when in fact he was gunned down outside Sparks Steakhouse in mid-town. And his incorrect description of the route he travelled by car from his friend's apartment in Flushing into the meat packing district downtown. Maybe only a NYer would notice or care but it shows lazy research on the writer's part.

[Irina]

DNF @40%

Great writing but the topic of death in such forensic details was too much to bear. I pressed on, hoping for a glimmer of romance to sweeten the harsh journey, but realised, there would be no hope for that either. And, for the sake of my mental health, I've decided to drop it sooner rather than later.

However, a few days have gone by and my thoughts kept drifting to the book. So, I've done the unthinkable and skipped to the end to see whether I was right regarding the lack of romance. And let's just say, I was relieved that I didn't read the whole book.

[Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an easy read and was well-written at the sentence level. However, it did not exactly hold together as a novel. Worth the time to read if you come across it if nothing else than for the beautiful imagery presented in terms of love, loss, and longing. Plus kind of a fun look at life in a borough outside of Manhattan. I'd be interested to see more from this author.

[John Treat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts out strong-- Weir is funny, and gets all the details right. But then the book goes nowhere. There's not much a story, and a certain artlessness in the prose doesn't help keep the reader going, either. This is not Weir's fault, but every time Ava showed up in a scene, all I could see in my mind was an image of Margaret Cho.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read 53 pages, over the course of a week. Then put it down and had no urge to pick it up for 3 days. Still don't.

Characters didn't interest me in the least.

Picked up another from my pile and started on it, and eager to get back to it.

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know that everybody does not agree, but, this book really spoke to me.

I recognized the locale around New York (hello Queens College, Flushing).
I recognized the characters. I went to college with some of the characters.
I recognize the self-depricating humor.
The book was funny, and, smart.

[Sean Forbes · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Weir is my former creative writing in fiction professor from Queens College. I really enjoyed the directness and intimacy of the novel. Excellent work!

[Danielle Duffy]

John Weir is my former writing mentor and professor. His words are powerful, intelligent and thoughful. I loved this book from first draft to last!!

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. Touching and poignant. And really good on both straight men and gay men and the friendships they have with each other.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Like me, they are in love with failure."

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was way better than his first one. I know ". . . Eddie Socket" was an AIDS fiction classic, but I found it to be a chore. This was much more readable, with some similar messages.

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review at:
http://www.ordinarycanary.com/book-re...