Dirty Words: “Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration” (Vintage) by David Wojnarowicz

Memoirs won’t go away. They hit bookseller gold almost 20 years ago with “Angela’s Ashes” by Frank McCourt, and since that time bestseller lists are top-heavy with over-sharers and narcissists. So few of these stories, nowadays often the author’s first book, are worthy of attention, either as art or even as entertainment. 

At the dawn of the Age of Memoirs, however, one book came out and we really mean came out. Artist David Wojnarowicz was known as a contemporary of the New York school of graffiti artists and modern primitives who cashed in on the 1980s lust for cartoon celebrity. He rose to the top of this flashy group with fellow journeymen in the new style, including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Unlike those visual artists, Wojnarowicz’s medium was more expansive, bleeding into photography and writing.

He was also an activist at a time when homosexual issues weren’t just in the closet, but swept under the rug. How come so few people know who David Wojnarowicz is today? People who should know. His name was distinctive enough to stick in the imagination, you saw it around, but who could pronounce it? If you can’t say his name in conversation, does he exist? Even today, with major museums collecting his works, it’s still hard to pronounce his name. Learn how. It's voy-nah-ROH-vitch, according to his NYT obit. That's important.

His memoir is impressionistic, wandering, grammatically loose, but draws you in slowly and then so tight you can’t escape. After finishing this book, you’ll hunger to read everything by him and about him. At first, there’s an, “Ugh, another cruising the zippers of alleyway trade travelogue” feeling to the proceedings. More homosexual decadence. And there's certainly plenty of that. 

If you’re familiar with New York City in the transitional decade of the 1980s, when the crumbling 1970s began to give way to the new Gilded Era the city is today, you’ll love the tarnish. It’s tawdry pick-ups on the West Side docks, complete with murals by the famous artists, when their art was still in the wild, as backdrops for anonymous male couplings and a blow job for every glory hole. 

Why is it that outlaw literature is soaked in this stuff? Maybe because "this stuff" is outlawed. Keep reading.

The nonlinear narrative begins to form a character in your head, David Wojnarowicz, and you’ll like him as he rages against the institutional prejudice ignoring and even actively encouraging the burgeoning AIDS crisis, the daily deaths of friends and enemies and everyone it seemed. 

Wojnarowicz came from abuse, so he knows it when it kicks him in the ass or, worse, left him to die of a disease ignored and underfunded until it was too late for too many. His story, and the story of those like him who stood up to power and took pride in what society covered in shame, are heroes. They should wear capes and spandex, and many of them did. 

He wrote, drew, painted, photographed, whatever, to leave a monument behind of himself at that moment in a world that he was barred from and invisible to. But AIDS gave his life a focus, a sharp point that he could stab into the eye of a monster that was made up of many of us even if we didn't know it. You’ll envy his direction, his righteousness. His purpose. 

When an artist matures at a time that calls on him or her to take a stand, then their work almost beyond their control takes on a resonance and strength, a creative leap and moral fortitude that makes it for the ages. This is not art for art’s sake, for art for art’s sake is the luxury of those not targeted. When there’s a bull’s-eye on your back it affects the way you move. 

But this book, unlike the majority of memoirs that look at the author’s navel and mistakes gold for lint, is not solely about Wojnarowicz’s numerous sexual encounters, his art and activism, his lovers and community ravished by a diseased dismissed as the gay cancer. Wojnarowicz is generous enough to tell the story of others, specifically another. Who else will? 

The last long section of the book isn't even about him, but a character who would have been lost, was consciously erased by his family, but survives in the recollection of Wojnarowicz and his friends, who he interviews, dreams that he documents and a trip to Mexico and a bullfight that pulls all the frayed threads together and ends the book with a feeling of awe.

Buy "Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration" by David Wojnarowicz here