The homos at The Advocate have an interesting interview with gay first time novelist and one-time hustler Mack Friedman. His book, Setting the Lawn on Fire is a queer coming of age tale that manages to be sexy and smart all at the same time.
Edmund White gave the novel a glowing review, and one can see Friedman’s novel as brilliantly building on and reinvigorating the tradition White established in A Boy’s Own Story: novels that map the dizzying, messy, exuberant terrain of growing up queer in a country where you have to learn along the way.
Our favorite part of the interview:
When I was a kid I kept a meticulous journal of my jerk-off fantasies. I found it a few years ago cleaning stuff from my parents’ house. This book is, in a sense, a compendium of my boyhood desires, filtered by 10 years of adulthood and a damn good editor named Raphael Kadushin.
Damn, we knew we should have kept a journal. Either way, we’ll be heading out this weekend to get us a copy of Setting the Lawn on Fire.
The Boy Who Loved Too Much [The Advocate]
