Love in the Time of Bloomberg

In person, Choire Sicha hums with as much energy as the city he so incisively describes in Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City (Harper), which came out in August. At O Café, where I meet him between a photo shoot and radio interview, he greets me, asks the barista what isn’t caffeinated, then returns to the table asking, “Didn’t this used to be Joe Jr.’s?”

In Very Recent History, Sicha—who is the “copropietor” of The Awl and a former editor of Gawker—details the interconnected lives of a group of gay men in New York City as they struggle to sustain themselves in the face of the recession and make sometimes clumsy attempts at tenderness. The delight of this nonfiction book is not only that it reads with the ease and artistry of a novel, but also how Sicha observes the most quotidian elements of modern urban life: with an anthropological detachment, as if for an audience entirely unfamiliar with the peculiarities we have come to accept as normal (money, marriage, the politics of mayoral term limits). “Almost everything in the City was capital,” he explains. What’s also notable about the book is that its central characters are all quite obviously gay—but Sicha never once says so explicitly. “Gay” never once appears in the book.

Sicha wrote Very Recent History in Miami, where he had moved with his boyfriend after going “totally broke.” On how he conceived the book’s alien perspective, he says, “I think I was having a nervous breakdown, in retrospect.”

“When you leave New York—I’ve lived here for 20 years essentially—everything’s terrible. [In Miami] I didn’t have any friends. I was scrounging coins out of the coach for gas money, because you needed gas money down there, and all I had to do was write. I was away from New York, I felt weird about everything, everyone I knew had gotten fired…The distance really helped. I thought: What is this city? You walk around like a ghost, like—this is where Joe Jr.’s was, where I came for omelets at four in the morning; now it’s got plants on the table, and healthy juice,” he adds, gesturing to his own.

Sicha’s book offers no neat resolution to its central conflict—how to survive in a haunted city in crisis where change is a constant—but the true story of his friends and acquaintances confirms the value of love, in its many forms, and even in its impermanence. In one of my favorite passages, he muses:

“Sometimes work was just what you clocked into while you were falling in love. Sometimes sex was just something you did while you weren’t at work. Drugs were something you did sometimes when you couldn’t deal with one of those things, or with yourself.”

Very Recent History forces us to look at the everyday of New York City at a slant and, in doing so, allows us to see it more clearly. Sicha’s is a prophetic and uncommonly good debut.