At Certain Points We Touch
by Lauren John Joseph
Bloomsbury Publishing
It was four in the morning when the narrator, a trans writer living in Mexico City, is walking home from a club and realises that it is the birthday of the leapling man who had died before they had stopped loving him. It had been ten years since they met when they were 21 and 23, six years since they last spoke and four years since Thomas James had died.
For the trans-androgynous narrator, Thomas James’ death remains a defining fault line in their life and this book is a way to bring him back. Writing about their white hot but doomed love affair gives the narrator insights that they wouldn’t have been privy to without writing, and they reflect that the book they thought they were writing is somehow writing them.
The actually details of how Thomas James died are withheld until the very end of the book and the narrator admits that they are chasing the sun for another five minutes of self-indulgence… much the same as Virginia Woolf kept her brother who had died of typhoid alive by writing in her letters that he had recovered when he had already died.
Wanting to keep Thomas James alive for as long as possible and needing more time to say goodbye, this part biography, part fiction and part slash (a story in which the male characters are involved in an explicit sexual relationship as a primary plot element) takes the reader into the intoxicating millennial lives of the writer and his queer friends in London, San Francisco and New York.
“We were communards hell-bent on seizing the night, liberating it for ourselves, appearing at every party deserving our self-regarding brilliance, dressed to kill, or fight at least.”
In this act of remembrance and penance, the writer mostly finds themselves in one inane, precarious situation after another. They were “searching for something more than the hand dealt us offered” but couldn’t see how it was possible for a person to be working class, transgender and successful all at once.
Although attending more parties than lectures, the narrator did finish their university degree and eventually they undertake a Masters in Experimental Writing. At Certain Points We Touch is a journey to maturity. The narrative is all about the obsession with a ‘first love’ and delves into the excuses and lies people tell themselves when they love someone.
Lezly Herbert
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