Your Nostalgia is Killing Me

In eleven linked stories, prize-winning novelist John Weir brings his wit and compassion to the question of how a gay white guy from New Jersey lived through fifty years of the twin crises of global AIDS and toxic masculinity in America.

John Weir, author of The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, a defining novel of 1980s New York in its response to the global AIDS crisis, has written a story collection that chronicles the long aftermath of epidemic death, as recorded in the tragicomic voice of a gay man who survived high school in the 1970s, the AIDS death of his best friend in the 1990s, and his complicated relationship with his mother, “a movie star without a movie to star in,” whose life is winding to a close in a retirement community where she lives alone with her last dog.

ADVANCE PRAISE

Your Nostalgia is Killing Me is a witty short story collection. Eleven linked first-person short stories tell the story of a protagonist whose early adolescent experiences of homophobia in a small town and whose adult loss of his best friend to AIDS during the height of the epidemic write the script for his life, propelling him in and out of relationships with friends, loved ones, and lovers who expect too much or too little. Taking place at acting classes, cinemas, funerals, high school graduation ceremonies, plays, public protest demonstrations, retirement homes, and sex parlors, these eleven linked stories pull at the thin line between erasure and exposure, all the while skillfully highlighting the performative nature of death, grief, illness, love, masculinity, and sexuality against the backdrop of late twentieth-century US culture.”
—Dr. Amina Gautier

White text stating Your Nostalgia is Killing Me linked stories by John Weir over a blue paint-stroked background with a yellow crescent moon.

John Weir

Publication Date: April 26, 2022

Genre/Imprint: Fiction, Red Hen Press

$16.95 Tradepaper

Shop: Red Hen, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble

ISBN: 9781636280295

News

John Weir interviewed for Bay Area Reporter!

If patience is a virtue, then fans of award-winning gay writer John Weir are among the most virtuous people you will ever find. Weir won a Lambda Literary Award for his remarkable 1989 debut novel The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket and then had his readers wait 17 years for his second novel, 2006’s devastating What I […]

Reviews

PEN America Interviews John Weir, Author of YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME!

The title of your book Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, seems to be an ironic one. The protagonist’s nostalgia is seemingly running havoc on his own life. He can’t escape revisiting the past and all the losses he has incurred: losses in love, familial losses, and the loss wrought by the AIDS epidemic.

Novelist Kate Rounds reviews John Weir’s YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME!

For three decades, the novelist and short story writer John Weir has been spooling out wry, wrenching narratives that ground us in time and place. Now, Red Hen Press has released Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. These 11 linked stories return us to Weir’s world of gay […]

John Weir’s YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME Reviewed In Gay City News!

John Weir’s “Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me,” alternately identified as “Short Stories” and “Linked Stories” — 11 in all — is wise, often funny, and poignant yet unsentimental testimony from a narrator named John Weir, whose formative life experiences were his bullying as a youth and the death of “half the people I knew when […]

YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME Reviewed on NY Journal of Books!

“Weir writes beautifully, elegantly.” The horrific AIDS epidemic inspired a flourishing of literature by writers more openly, proudly, often angrily, gay than their predecessors had been. These young writers had been surrounded by suffering and death from a devastating disease, accompanied by rejection from family and indifference from government and the medical establishment. John Weir’s […]

John Weir’s YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME reviewed in Five South!

John Weir’s linked stories explore sexuality and separation through platonic love, activism, art, and death — in a time when gender was confined to “girl, boy, or faggot” and AIDS ravages a generation. Stories span the 70s, 80s, and 90s as an unnamed narrator navigates the long aftermath of an epidemic and tries to close […]

John Weir’s YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME reviewed in Kirkus Reviews!

Weir’s linked collection of bittersweet, often witty stories elucidates almost 50 years in the life of a gay White man in the U.S., from enduring school taunts in 1970s New Jersey to experiencing the horrors of AIDS to that epidemic’s continuing reverberations for a scarred (and mostly HIV-positive) generation.