David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, 1991
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration includes eight of David Wojnarowicz’s essays from the late 1970s through the early ’90s.
David’s stream-of-conscious approach immerses readers in his most intimate experiences and observations: “In loving him, I saw a cigarette between the fingers of a hand, smoke blowing backwards into the room, and sputtering planes diving low through the clouds. In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms … I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.” According to biographer Cynthia Carr, David thought of this memoir as a fusion of fiction and nonfiction: “He had decided to let everything in his emotional history become part of his palette, whether or not he remembered it accurately.”
Included in the memoir is “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell”—an essay inspired by a kitchen-table conversation with a friend dying of HIV/AIDS. Written for the 1989 Artists Space exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, organized by Nan Goldin, the controversy over the essay prompted the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to threaten withdrawal of exhibition funding.
David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 1992. London: Serpent’s Tail.
Close to the Knives was first published by Vintage Books (Random House) in 1991, with David’s 1988 Untitled (Buffalos Falling) on the cover. Open Road Media re-released the book in 2014 as part of a series of republished Kindle editions of Memories That Smell Like Gasoline, The Waterfront Journals, and In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz.
Additional resources re: David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.