I Remember

(Paperback)

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Description

With a new introduction by Olivia Laing, alongside Paul Auster's original.

'A masterpiece. One by one, the so-called important books of our time will be forgotten, but Joe Brainard's modest little gem will endure.' Paul Auster

An enduring gem, Joe Brainard's I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic. Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each beginning with the refrain 'I remember': 'I remember that little jerk you give just before you fall asleep. Like falling.'

Recollections - jokes, confessions, daydreams and memories - were carefully, lovingly woven together. They were of family and friends; of movie stars; of early heterosexual fumblings and later gay life. Brainard's pared-back prose dodged both self-pity and judgement of others, and was written with an ear for musical cadence and an extraordinary painter's eye. The result is witty, incantatory, profound and wholly captivating.

Reviews

'In simple, forthright, declarative sentences, he charts the map of the human soul . . . I Remember is both uproariously funny and deeply moving.' Paul Auster
'I would make a case for I Remember as one of the twenty or so most important American autobiographies, important for its air of unimportance and for its mingling of cultural bric-a-brac with sexual frankness and self-revelation.' New Yorker
'Completely original.' Edmund White
'Buy it, for everyone you know . . . I can't think of a more original or lovely book.' Olivia Laing
'Joe Brainard discovered a memory machine.' Siri Hustvedt
'It's a great work that will last and last - in other words, it is literature.' James Shuyler
'Astonishing . . . a relentlessly specific time-capsule of a book, which bizarrely, movingly, seems to slip the confines of time.' Daily Telegraph
'A landmark work for so many memoirists.' Adelle Stripe

Author Bio

Joe Brainard grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and moved to New York when he was eighteen, where he became a vital presence in the city's art and poetry scenes of the 1960s and 1970s. He died in 1994.

Olivia Laing is a writer and critic. They are the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Crudo and The Garden Against Time. In 2018, they were awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction and in 2017, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Laing's books have been translated into twenty-one languages.