At Certain Points We Touch

£7.495
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At Certain Points We Touch

At Certain Points We Touch

RRP: £14.99
Price: £7.495
£7.495 FREE Shipping

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Description

A sweeping and shattering portrait of youth, friendship and first love, by an electrifying new voice Would it insult your pride to know that I began to entertain your advances because I wanted you to replace Lulu with me; so that I could, in a way, become her, even if only in my mind and in your arms? So that I could take on the beautiful transgender body that I still could not admit to wanting. JJ was in love once, that is what they suppose, though it’s with uncertainty & something like a catharsis that they type out a book formatted recollection of their time with the man who was an obtuse villain whom everyone enjoyed sexually encountering but whom no one desired to know on a deeper level. Perchance should you wonder, as JJ does, what is deeper than the confines of our physical insides, I feel that the discussion is pointless. There are two sides of the same coin & neither is necessarily wrong. One can be in love with a soul, a body, an entity’s whole; none of it really matters because in the end we can drop dead at the flip of a crusted silver dime & be gone forever after. It’s four in the morning, and our narrator is walking home from the club when they realise that it’s February 29th - the birthday of the man who was something like their first love. Piecing together art, letters and memory, they set about trying to write the story of a doomed affair that first sparked and burned a decade ago.

JJ is someone who is incredibly naive while being willfully ignorant, almost seeking to place themselves into situations wherein they are tumbled like dry leaves. They abhor work—they have no ethic for that if we’re being honest—& spend all their time squatting at friends’ houses until they decide on a new location to sustain their nightlife needs. The flamboyance of life is not lost on JJ, they take full advantage of the freedoms of youth yet, in all the time that has passed since the introductory paragraphs, leading us to the moment we encounter this written eulogy to a dead lover, JJ has made zero progress in developing a sense of self. A phenomenal eulogy to, presumably, a fictional gay lover from a trans woman in what appears to be the early oughts almost coming-of-age story nested in the (again, fictional, I presume) London queer scene of the time. On the anniversary of her lover's death, she descends into a fit of hypergraphia—chronicling—through an open letter directed at the deceased reader—her life predominantly through the lens of the tremulous and exultant relationship with the complex rendered dead. The definition of unflinching really, since it’s as much about characterizing the narrator as it is him, Thomas, now 4 years gone. In this superbly written, sparklingly smart tale of love, lust, and loss, a transgender narrator is suddenly reminded of Thomas James, a boy they met ten years ago, last spoke to six years ago, and who died four years ago. The rest of the book unfurls as the narrator attempts to commit their life to paper as a form of exorcism – of memories, of places and people, and mostly of the ghost of their lover.

Advance Praise

At Certain Points We Touch(2022) is a roaring yet poignant coming-of-age story of first loves and last rites by Lauren John Joseph, a British-born, American-educated artist who works at the intersection of video, text, and live performance. Their debut novel is at once a testament to the enduring fabric of love and a heart-breaking ode to the many lessons that come with grief – often too late. All of which was to say, the emotional heart of this novel I understood more than I felt. I didn’t blame the heroine for her terrible taste in men, but I felt I zero connection to either the terrible Thomas James or the less-terrible Adam who provide the corners of this nasty little love triangle. And, of course, maybe that was the point: this is, after all, a story Bibby is narrating and better for it to be about her than the two basic cis men in her life, but I think with them never feeling quite real, it impacted the realness of Bibby too. Love is like learning a foreign language, a new tongue every time. You have to study the rules and the grammar, but until they become instinctive in you, you will always be fumbling to conjugate, incomprehensible and confused. Until the language is alive in you and automatic, and you can skip between tenses with ease of motion, you remain nothing but a child whose words cannot be taken seriously. Until the day arrives when you can talk about what you have, what you have had, what you once had, without stopping to run throughYo tengo, Yo tuve, Yo tenía , then you are lost in illiteracy. Love has to be intuitive, second nature, a reflex, but I hadn’t reached that point with you yet. I wasn’t at one with the logic of the language, so I could only feel pained, I couldn't ask what it was that had wounded me. I couldn’t formulate the question, I could only sob and offer more inexpressible groanings.”

I was provided with a digital ARC of this book thanks to the publishing house, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK & ANZ), , in exchange for an honest review. I crash into my apartment, drop my coat to the floor and skitter, still drunk, towards the kitchen table. I know that I have to begin right here and now, at 5.15 a.m., at least to make a start, if I am to ever to crawl up out of this perdition. With a clean sweep of my right hand I clear a mess of mail and half-read magazines from the tabletop, grab for my computer with my left, and began to write. At the end of the day, this is not a bad book. This is a case wherein I am not the target audience & I recognize that this work will find its way to those readers who will adore every aspect of it. The author is a dedicated & tender writer, I felt very moved by certain passages & immediately immersed in the narrative. However, I was hoping to see more of what was expressed in the prologue. I was hoping for this story to be just as tender as the prose. I suppose that is quite like reality; we might hold out hope for something as much as we wish but, in truth, we come upon things unprepared. When did you know you were dead? I’m asking you a question that I know you can never answer. It is now ten years since we met, six years since we last spoke, four years since your death, and I’m writing you this from Mexico City, under grave obligation. It is not a letter, since I know you cannot reply; maybe it’s another monologue, certainly it does not require a second choice; let’s call it plainsong then. This is the chant recalling your life, it is fiction, it is biography, it is transfiguration”. Ten years earlier, and our young narrator and a boy named Thomas James, long aware of one another across bars and readings and other murky late-night gatherings, fall into bed with one another over the summer of their graduation. Their ensuing affair, with its violent, animal intensity, its intoxicating and toxic power play, will initiate a dance of repulsion and attraction that will cross years, span continents, drag in countless victims – and culminate in terrible betrayal.covering night-life, nightclubs, bedrooms, sex, sexy dialogue, queerness, fabulous flamboyant “dirty bastards’, love, loss, Lisa Minnelli humor, affections, humiliation, flaunted transfemininity, Thank you to the publisher for providing me an advanced e-copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
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