Close to the Knives is an urgent incendiary memoir, grounded mostly in feeling, that mixes forms, calling into question how documentation and archives function in relation to queer memories and experience. Linear heterosexual time, which dictates the expected linear beginning to end narrative form is completely warped by queer time and so the memoir “drifts” across spaces and decades and in and out of surreal dreams. Suicide and death burst unabashedly forward from its pages and made me cry. At moments the memoir is so poetic and abstract I was wandering through a confusing fever dream where time moved like thick hazy wisps of smoke. Other moments are concrete, detailed and specific and time runs out like an apocalypse; sharply clocked by the tick of corpses and the tick tock of dead friends and the ticking ticking tick tock of his own fading health and deteriorating body.Would recommend listening to the book on audible for a powerful, moving, sonic experience!