What I Did Wrong - by John Weir (Paperback)

About the Book

Tom, a forty-two-year-old English professor and gay man, is haunted by the death of his best friend Zack, who died of AIDS, but finds new friendships with his male students.

Book Synopsis

Set in a rapidly gentrifying New York City determined to move beyond the decimation of a generation a decade earlier, What I Did Wrong is a day in the life of Tom, a forty-two-year-old English professor, haunted by the death of his best friend, Zack, who died theatrically and calamitously of AIDS. Tom himself slouches gingerly and precariously into middle age questioning every certainty he had about himself as a gay man while negotiating the field of his college classes, populated as they are with guys whose cocky bravado can't quite compensate for their own confused masculinity. Tom tries to balance his awkwardly developing friendships with them. In the process, he begins to find common ground with these proud young men and, surprisingly, a way to claim his own place in the world, and in history.

A powerfully moving--and often disarmingly funny--book about loss, character, and sexuality in the wake of AIDS, What I Did Wrong is a survivor's tale in an age when all certainties have lost their logic and focus. It is a romance that embraces its objects from the traumas of toxic masculinity to the aftermath of catastrophic loss amidst the enduring allure of New York City in all its manic and heartbreaking grandeur.

From the Back Cover

"A wry memoir of the AIDS era that is not so much elegy as ode to a hopeful and even lyric future."--The Baltimore Sun

Review Quotes

A lovely, wrenching, funny, erudite novel, heavy with history and loss and beauty.---David Rakoff

A wry memoir of the AIDS era that is not so much elegy as ode to a hopeful and even lyric future.-- "The Baltimore Sun"

Extraordinary . . . among other things one of the best books about how ordinary folks live in New York now.---Edmund White, The Village Voice

Weir's prose has humor and grace to spare.-- "Publishers Weekly"

About the Author

John Weir is a professor of English and creative writing at Queens College, CUNY. He is the author of two novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket and What I Did Wrong, both available from New York ReLit, an imprint of Fordham University Press. Weir's short story collection, Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me (Red Hen Press, 2022), is the winner of the 2020 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction.