Grief, by Andrew Holleran

Holleran writes regularly for the Gay and Lesbian Review, where I enjoy reading him. This novel, from 2006, is another of Holleran’s fictionalized memoirs. I got started on Holleran’s novels by reading, Dancer from the Dance, based on the recommendation of a friend who had read it recently, and the fact that it’s a gay classic that I had long wanted to read. After I posted my diary entry, in which I pointed out some problems with the novel’s chronology and its melancholy portrait of gay men in the 1970s (while enjoying it overall) a different friend suggested I read Grief. When I visited the library, though, Grief wasn’t on the shelf, but they had Holleran’s most recent novel, from 2022 (the only novel he’s published since Grief) Kingdom of Sand, so I checked that out and read it first. Like Dancer from the Dance, I found Kingdom of Sand beautifully written, but I was again frustrated by the central character who is smart, and cultured, and clearly wants love, but settles for a closed-up and lonely life. His sexual needs are met in anonymous sex, which does nothing to satisfy his need for intimacy. His cultural needs are met, in Kingdom of Sand, only by evenings watching old movies and listening to music with a friend in the friend’s home. The tone is beautiful, but sad, and irritating.

Grief has the same problems. The main character, who is also the narrator of the novel, written in first person and never named, is living in Florida but has accepted the offer, arranged by a friend, to teach at a University in Washington D.C for a spring semester, filling in for a colleague on sabbatical. The D.C. friend, named Frank, thinks getting out of Florida would be good for the narrator (let’s call him Andrew) as Andrew’s mother has recently died and Andrew is mourning. Kingdom of Sand tells the longer story of Andrew’s mother’s death, and his father before her, as well as the aftermath, and includes an occasional trip up to Washington D.C..

Andrew rents a room from a gay man living on N Street near Dupont Circle. In his bedroom, he finds a book of Mary Todd Lincoln’s letters, whose life was colored by loss and grief. Reading through her letters over the course of the semester becomes a through-line of the novel as Holleran tells the story of her life after Lincoln’s assassination. He takes walks in the evenings. During the days he visit museums. He teaches, though little is made of that. He visits his friend Frank, who has a boyfriend named Lug. The landlord is single but places a personal ad to try to meet someone. Andrew visits a sex club once a week on Thursdays when it’s half price for men over thirty-five. If he’s home during the day when the landlord is out, Andrew let’s the landlord’s dog out of the study where the landlord keeps him. Everyone keeps telling him to “move on” from his grief but he insists it isn’t possible.

Dancer from the Dance is about gay life in the 1970s as lived by a very specific generation of gay men who had come of age sexually in the pre-Stonewall era and who found that the earlier experience of shame and repression couldn’t be entirely banished by the disco music and drugs of the 70s. Grief is about that same specific generation of gay men who lived their mature years in the midst the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. It’s about loss, but not just the loss of a parent, which is the primary loss of the novel, a loss all middle-aged persons know, but the wider and cumulative loss over years and years of friends and lovers, again and again, and again.

I lived through both decades, too, but I’m younger. I was born in 1962. My first recognition of myself as gay came in the post-Stonewall context of growing liberation. I navigated the AIDS years in my 20s before I’d made significant relationships. I lost friends and colleagues at the AIDS Project where I worked, but not life-long friends or long-term lovers. Holleran, born in 1944, learned homosexual shame before gay pride and experienced AIDS as a destroyer of lives created, rather than the dangerous obstacle to be carefully avoided the way it was for me. So though I see myself in his novels, as a gay man, in significant ways it’s a very different gay man he’s writing about.

Toward the end of the novel there’s a lovely, long, scene, where Andrew visits the mother of a friend who had died from AIDS. She’s living, now, in an apartment complex in Washington. He visits her there and they have dinner together in the building’s cafeteria. He speaks of his dead mother. She speaks of her son. They ruminate on survivor’s guilt, and whether the dead continue to exist in some way. Nothing is resolved. The hole in his heart doesn’t close. The semester ends and he returns to Florida and his parent’s empty house.