David Boley’s Reviews > Less > Status Update

Oh the number of times I’ve had this conversation with myself,

“Fuck love and just get fat.”

“… you’re going to have to figure something out. You see all these men over fifty, these skinny men with mustaches. Imagine all the dieting and exercise and effort of fitting into your suits from when you were thirty! And then what? You’re still a dried-up old man. Screw that...”

Through a wide cast if characters, the author captures so many facets of my lived experience as a gay man. This book is required reading for any man on his coming-out journey.

“Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.”

“How awful for the string of inequities to be brought out in his mind, that useless rosary, so he can finger again those memories: … The regret of Robert. The agony of Freddy. His brain sits before its cash register again, charging him for old shames as if he has not paid before. He tries but cannot let it go.”

“like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well.”

““How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting? ”

the author’s style is superb. The story… seems almost biographical in parts. Arthur P. Less is highly relatable.