Memoir – I’d even say lyric memoir, a la Maggie Nelson. Not sure I’m using that category quite correctly, but it seems to me that there are two broad areas of writing that distinguish lyric memoir from more conventional life-writing: the artfully (if intermittently) nonlinear flow of ideas, images, events, and reflections, and the play with language. How the author’s enactment of these elements works or does not for you as a reader will have a significant impact on your experience of the book. In this case, for me, the flow of content mostly worked, but there were more instances where the language play did not. Your mileage will, of course, vary. In any case, I enjoyed it overall. The author’s intensely queer and quite lonely middle-aged life in Seattle is radically different from my life in many ways, but the way the book wrestled with themes of desire, community, friendship, the urban, belonging, and what to do with radical political sensibilities in an individual life – all through a lens of aging, which I don’t think got much direct discussion but that at least to me felt palpable throughout – echoed in interesting, complex, and partial ways with fragments of my own experience and feelings and imaginings. Despite the fact that some elements of the writing didn’t always work for me, if you enjoy lyric memoir I would recommend it.