Robert Glück’s Gloriously Unreliable Memorial to a Lost Love

Bob and Ed met at a San Francisco streetcar stop in 1970. The two men were in their early twenties. They had each come from watching the same film that evening, Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s debauched landmark “Trash.” Ed, who wore a blue peacoat, his hair below his shoulders, spoke first. “I noticed you in the theater,” he said. “Are there other movies like that?” He opened his sketchbook to display his drawings. Bob rode the trolley one stop, hopped off, and ran back to Ed. They lived together for eight years and remained close after they broke up. “Bob” and “Ed” are Robert Glück and Ed Aulerich-Sugai. This scene appears in Glück’s new book, “ About Ed ,” a hybrid of fiction and memoir that incorporates Bob’s narration and Ed’s own words into a contrapuntal account of their lives together and apart. Ed was an artist—he painted clouds, X-rays, cells, nudes—and a gifted gardener who eventually became an orchid horticulturist at Golden Gate Park’s world-renowned Conservatory of Flowers. He tested positive for H.I.V. in 1987, and Bob helped care for him until he died from complications of AIDS , in 1994. Glück, who co-founded the experimental New Narrative literary movement in the late nineteen-seventies, has written two autobiographical long narratives, “ Margery Kempe ” and “ Jack the Modernist ,” that center around a literary stand-in named “Bob,” whose background and experience are basically his own. Two decades ago, he started a project about his life with Ed, having begun to accumulate notes and chapters before his ex’s demise. That manuscript became “About Ed,” which was published, in November, by NYRB. Glück is a self-professed slow writer, but he was also delayed by the burden of his book’s content—the subject was his first real boyfriend, and he had to sift through the intricacies of mourning and mortality. “I think I had to grow older, to be closer to my own death,” Glück, who turned seventy-six last year, told The Paris Review in a recent interview. Time enabled him to create something uncommon and powerful. “About Ed” is […]

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