A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 SO FAR
“Illuminating, heartbreaking, hilarious, romantic, terrifying, thrilling, baffling, joyous—such is life! And such are the diaries of our great writer Thomas Mallon, who has preserved in The Very Heart of It one precious moment in time told in his inestimable style. I found myself reading addictively. A world opens up in these pages. What a book!” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less and Less Is Lost
“While reading The Very Heart of It, I tried to discipline myself, but suddenly it was 4 AM. Thomas Mallon’s diaries, focusing on the 1980s through the early 90s, depict that era with heartbreaking accuracy, from the dread of an AIDS test to the glory of living, on cobbled-together funds, in the social and cultural capitol of New York City. His portraits of the rancorous literary scene, political ferment and his hectic love life are witty, original and sinfully entertaining (it’s a rare work that travels from Robert Mapplethorpe to Dan Quayle). Upon reaching the final page all I wanted was more.” —Paul Rudnick, author of What is Wrong with You?
“Thomas Mallon’s The Very Heart of It is a big-hearted account of his life from 1983 to 1994, as he was becoming the distinguished American man of letters and man-about-town that he manifestly is now. It’s also a modern-day, Defoe-esque diary of the plague years, when AIDS swept through the country, scything its grim swath through the artist community. It’s fittingly ironic that Mallon, arguably our best living historical novelist, made his first splash with a non-fictional book about famous diarists. With this book, he joins those ranks.” —Christopher Buckley, author of Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir
“‘We’ve all been exposed, we’re all living under the sword.’ Among many forlorn entries, this sentence is one that perhaps best encapsulates The Very Heart of It, Thomas Mallon’s moving epistolary memoir chronicling a coming-of-age during the AIDS crisis. . . . The journals, with both candor and levity, reveal a city at once inhibited by Reagan-era conservatism and emboldened by passionate social justice. Mallon’s diaries are a powerful and palpable historical record, sure to remind many of the injustices faced by so many LGBTQ folk only a few decades ago.” —Nathan Smith, The Observer
“Merging a young gay man’s keenly observed coming of age, a lively tour of a bygone literary New York, and a devastating portrait of the city during the height of the AIDS crisis, the diaries capture the creative energy and lasting sorrow of a remarkable era.” —The New Yorker
“[Mallon’s] diaries capture the atmosphere of a city and community reeling from the AIDS crisis amid the material optimism of Reagan-era America. His writing stands out for its honesty and authenticity, offering a vivid, personal chronicle of a transformative era.” —Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
“Throughout a career spanning seven works of nonfiction and 11 novels . . . Mallon has managed to capture the all of it: the tragic and mundane, the petty and comically absurd lurking in even the weightiest moments of the past. Turns out that all along in his diaries, Mallon was simultaneously doing the same for his own life and times. . . . In addition to being a real-time threnody to AIDS and its victims, as well as a love letter to a New York where the Runyonesque waitress in the local coffee shop will call him “Cookie” and a walk can include sightings of Greta Garbo and Jackie Kennedy, The Very Heart of It is also a portrait of an artist trying to break free of his day job. . . . Mallon is well aware he’s one of the lucky ones and his life’s great luck is also ours, his readers.” —Maureen Corrigan, on NPR’s “Fresh Air”
“[Mallon’s] diaries capture the youthful mood of a certain period in New York City. . . . He’s new in Manhattan, a gay man bending toward neoconservatism, relatively virginal and unsure in this pre-dating-app era how to meet anyone except in sketchy bars. This is early in the AIDS crisis, and confusion and terror are omnipresent. . . . The Very Heart of It functions as a Woody Allen-like ode to New York City. Mallon feels lucky, nearly every day, to be here, what with the Frick, the Carlyle and ‘the Chrysler Building twinkling across the street like the world’s ultimate Christmas tree.’” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
“What makes the book sing is the voice: smart, attuned to the specific, delightfully and relentlessly snide. . . . A kind of sketchbook of . . . literary life in New York City during the AIDS crisis, and Condé Nast in its last golden age. Mallon is a keen observer of not just himself but of his contemporaries, stray encounters on the street or in late-night bars, and the political scene.” —Thomas Beller, Air Mail
“While the diaries contained in The Very Heart of It do offer the reader one person’s experience of a great event—i.e., the AIDS crisis—they’re also an account of ambition, love, and work, offering a glimpse of a now mostly vanished literary milieu in New York City. What is fascinating about Mallon’s life as he tells it is the tension it holds. . . . Some entries capture the fleeting moments of everyday life so adeptly that they almost read like poetry. . . . What is unique about Mallon’s diary is that, in his reckoning as a gay man with the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, he never saw himself as either a victim or a capital-S survivor. Nor did he view his sexual identity as something incompatible with his politics or religion.” —Sheila McClear, The Nation
“What’s great about this book is it tells you so much about gay life in the 80s and 90s in New York, the heartbreak of AIDS, but also . . . there’s a fun amount of literary gossip in here, and it’s just as hilarious as it is heartbreaking.” —Bill Goldstein on “Weekend Today in New York”
“In novels including Henry and Clara and Fellow Travelers, Thomas Mallon has used American history to help tell unforgettable stories of characters whose lives feel real as they play out against true events. Here, the award-winning writer ditches the fiction without losing his knack for depicting times and places; his own diaries from a young-adult life in New York City in the 1980s and ’90s reveal a coming of age in a dangerous, exciting, and unprecedented era and share how one of American literature’s great writers tells his own tale.” —Town and Country
“Moving [and] bittersweet. . . . The many human moments (funny, sad, witty, horrible, and beautiful) populating Mallon’s diaries collectively (and vicariously) illuminate a supremely resilient community that soldiered on (and kept dancing) despite insurmountable loss and pain. An exquisitely evocative glimpse into an unparalleled era in queer history steeped in joy, sex, and death.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“Compulsively browsable. . . . Mallon’s diaries paint an arresting panorama of Reagan-era New York City, full of droll character studies. . . . [Mallon’s] prose conveys deep emotion with clear-eyed, matter-of-fact detail. It amounts to an engrossing evocation of an artist and a city in transition.” —Publishers Weekly
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