I first saw the name “Nate Lippens” while poking around alt-lit circles online. This might have been on Substack, or Twitter X.
He was mentioned as a new writer, apparently of the alt-lit milieu. Based on the name “Nate Lippens”, I pictured some young kid, who was funny maybe? Not necessarily an author, but maybe a Twitter anon, a political commentator or a Dimes Square personality, someone offbeat. He seemed to be someone significant though. It was unclear why.
And then, not long after that, I saw his name again. This time, whoever was mentioning him was assuming you knew who he was, and that you understood him to be a unique talent. He had a kind of special status. But again: why?
More recently, while considering books I might review, I remembered the mysterious “Nate Lippens”. I googled him. He was not alt-lit. He was older, in his 50s. He was gay and he’d written a book about his friends who died of AIDS.
The title of this work was My Dead Book. The author photo showed a heavy-set guy, with a beard and a serious expression on his face. He lived in the Midwest. He wasn’t part of any particular scene. And the AIDS thing . . . well . . . nobody really wrote about that anymore.
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But people seemed to think he was important, so I checked to see if My Dead Book was in my local suburban library system. It wasn’t. Was it in the larger Portland library system which prides itself on its LGBTQ collection? No, it wasn’t.
So I looked it up on Amazon. My Dead Book was there, but it was published as part of a very small indie-press series called “Fellow Travelers” which I’d never heard of. Maybe it was a poetry press?
Like really, where had this guy come from? Out of nowhere it appeared.
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So then I went on Goodreads to see what they had to say. There were not many reviews. But people were claiming My Dead Book was brilliant. One of the best books they’d ever read. Incredible. Beautiful, etc. And these weren’t pretentious literary types. These were normal people. I believed them.
So was this book a novel? People were calling it that. But it didn’t sound like a novel. It was only 130 pages. The reviewers on Goodreads said it was broken up into fragments and sketches. It was dream-like. It was one long prose poem.
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So then I went to the World Cat Inter-Library Loan website to see how many libraries in the United States and Canada owned My Dead Book. Not very many.
But there were a few, so I requested it. It took about three weeks to get to me. It came from the Mt. Holyoke College library in Northampton, Massachusetts, 3,000 miles away.
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To be honest, by the time My Dead Book arrived at my library, I’d forgotten I ordered it. By now, I was working on new things.
But since they’d sent it, I dutifully checked it out. It was a small book, 5” by 6.5”. It was designed as part of a series, having the same cover as several other books. The formatting looked weird and I wondered if it was part of a vanity press/experimental/gay lit project. The book was not particularly well made.
So then it floated around my apartment for two weeks. I didn’t have time to look at it. But the day before I had to return it, I forced myself to sit down and read a few pages.
It wasn’t experimental. It was clear, sharp writing that quickly sucked you in. It was minimal and vague in an unusual way. But the main thing: it was good. It was really good.
Unfortunately, because I’d waited so long, I had to return the book. So I took it back to my library and they sent it back to Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts.
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So now I really wanted to read it. And review it. I looked it up again and found that it was being reissued by Semiotexte, a well-known and high-quality independent press.
In fact, they were about to publish a second book by Lippens, a continuation of My Dead Book called Ripcord. They would release both books together. I emailed Semiotexte: could I get a review copy of the first book? They sent me one.
That took another couple weeks to arrive. By now I’d looked up Nate Lippens and knew a little more about him, mainly that he’d been a gay prostitute as a teenager in the Midwest where he grew up.
So this was going to be a Jean Genet, “My Own Private Idaho” kind of thing. A book not just about being gay. But about being a petty criminal as well.
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I started the book again. Lippens begins by describing his current situation: almost 50, gay, poor, living in hotels and apartments. He suffers from insomnia. And he is haunted by his dead friends.
He begins telling stories about these friends. Random stories. This person. That situation. The time they robbed a dead guy.
These are quick, non-contextualized sketches. His voice has a dream-like, dissociative quality. Like he is barely there himself.
Keenan and I were pallbearers for the funeral of an acquaintance because AIDS had already killed most of his friends. We borrowed absurd little suits from a regular trick . . . We played along, bowing our heads and listening as people spoke gibberish.
After the last solemn amen, we hauled the casket to the hearse, pretended to walk to our nonexistent car for the drive to the cemetery, and bussed home, where a fifth awaited
I see Keenan swagger down the street in his half-distracted way, checking himself out in store windows. Me, trailing, unhindered by beauty . . . .
Keenan gone, what, twenty-plus years?
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In a way, My Dead Book resembles a war novel. No sooner are you introduced to a character, then he or she is snuffed out. Others might last a couple years. And a few more will make it to the end.
Each individual story is shocking, heartbreaking, often funny, sometimes all within one paragraph:
That winter Frank kept the suicide hotlines busy. He tried not to call more than one a day but when he had to, he called different ones. There was a remarkable amount of them. He called the general ones and the gay ones and the addict ones. He skipped the god ones.
After Frank died a friend of his said, “Tragic—all the misspellings in his suicide note.”
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The book has an amazing flow. It really is a long dream-like poem. The prose is so effortless, you forget you’re reading words on a page.
And it’s so sad. But also removed. It’s such an interesting mental space to be in as a reader, even with all the bad stuff going on:
Things got darker and weirder. Arlo went from a person I spent time with, to a person I heard about. He smoked crack in various hotel rooms where he set off smoke detectors, overran bathtubs and stained the carpet with messy take out. He bragged about a sugar daddy and showed me a gold chain he’d been given. He was leaving us all behind. He’d hit the big time of whoredom. Good for him, I said. The others said he was lying or he’d be back. We were already divvying up his regulars.
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Initially there’s a hardness to Lippens’ voice, an unsentimental recounting of these desperate people and the various incidents involved.
But at the same time, an inevitable romanticism and nostalgia begins to seep in.
A friend drove a thousand miles to surprise Shane on his birthday. This was the height of allegiance, a brotherhood or sisterhood we strove to live. The visitor stood in the living room of the decrepit house, posing in the Sunday morning light, and we gathered around. Tomorrow someone would fuck a friend’s man, steal something for drugs, run a scam for fifteen bucks, but today with the smell of burnt coffee in the air . . . we greeted this odd arrival with love. Lemme take your coat. Lemme get you coffee. Have a seat. Need a bath? A blanket? Are you hungry? How do you like your eggs? Five boys playing mom.
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Even as a straight guy, I felt nostalgia for the world Lippens describes. I’m old enough to remember people like Nate. They lived like artists, even though they weren’t artists. They partied like rock stars, even though they weren’t rock stars.
They didn’t have careers, they had temp jobs, service jobs, to support their lifestyle of reading Christopher Isherwood novels and re-watching Joan Crawford films, which they talked about on the phone until dawn, drinking tea, smoking cigarettes, wearing satin robes they found at the Goodwill.
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Anyway, this is a great book. I’m sure My Dead Book will grow in stature as time goes by. It seems possible that the current LGBTQ generation may not approve of its pessimism and self-abasement. In that way, it might be a little out of step with the times. But that won’t matter. This is what it was like. And ultimately, people will value that.
Blake Nelson’s many novels include Girl, Recovery Road and Paranoid Park (adapted to film by Gus Van Sant). He’s also written for The New York Times, Sassy, Details and Conde Nast Traveler. New novel: The City Wants You.