At Certain Points We Touch

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At Certain Points We Touch is a story of first love and last rites, conjured against a vivid backdrop of London, San Francisco and New York - a riotous, razor-sharp coming-of-age story that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent. The narrator describes Leapling’s photography as “an experiment in seeing the world,” carried out with old cameras and even older film, such that the images might either come out beautifully or result in a series of completely black frames, streaked with red. I didn’t mind the unlikable protagonist, in love for whatever reason with an even more unlikeable character; I didn’t mind the woe-is-me tone it sometimes took, all those poor decisions that led nowhere, story-wise, but I can’t get over the writing. Gargantuan heavy goods vehicles, massive petroleum tankers and enormous Coca-Cola trucks thunde[r] across the dying night, bellowing diesel through the city, causing the pavement to rumble beneath our feet. Their ensuing affair, with its violent, animal intensity and 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.

They travel the trash/queer underground circuit from London to San Francisco to New York, Berlin and Mexico City with a crew of equally engaged marginalized survivors who read the best books and meet the best people, while go-go dancing, tricking, eating the most romantic cheap French fries and looking for their places in the world. 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? They more than compensate for sections when the pacing lags, the faint sense of awkwardness of essentially hanging around in a narrative waiting for a character to die, the times when the writing buckles under its own ambitions and falls apart.

The letters catapult the reader through 10 years of the narrator’s history, a journey of brilliantly queer millennial melodrama; doomed relationships, boozy evenings and late mornings, all amongst the vivid backdrops of contemporary London, New York, San Francisco and Mexico.

Sally McGrane is a Berlin-based journalist and the author of Moscow at Midnight (2018) , a spy novel, as well as another, Odesa at Dawn , which takes place in Ukraine shortly after the annexation of Crimea.My days are long past of days I’d be found in bar in San Francisco to a packed house of filled with ‘dress-to-kill’ people…. The book is also a knowing wink towards writing and autofiction, considering what is memory and story even when something is meant to be 'what happened', but this is combined with exploits and community and stumbling into things whilst young in ways that stop it just feeling like a book about writing a book. At Certain Points We Touch is an unflinching roman à clef about what it means to love someone and be devastated by their loss, without looking away from the fact that much of that person's character was unseemly.

He clamps the jaws of the tongs down on the date, scorching away day after day, month, after month, until years are elided in a montage that lasts no more than a minute.Every single page is heavy with meaning and though the language is admittedly pretentious at times, it is in the best possible way. But why should a Myspace profile be preserved when whole civilisations have been annihilated to boost the egos of European monarchs? Thank you to the publisher for providing me an advanced e-copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. She is also in love with, and spends the entire book writing to, an even more unlikeable character, and it's impossible to see why she is so addicted to him. The poetic pros, the intense (at times graphic) imagery, the commitment to memorialized past, and even the narrative structure.