Describe your latest book.
I like to say that
Sketchtasy is a novel that takes place in that late-night moment when everything comes together, and everything falls apart. This is Boston in 1995, a city defined by a rabid fear of difference — Alexa, an incisive 21-year-old queen, faces everyday brutality with determined nonchalance. Rejecting middle-class pretensions, she negotiates past and present traumas with a scathing critique of the world. Drawn to the ecstasy of drugged-out escapades, Alexa searches for nourishment in a gay culture bonded by clubs and conformity, willful apathy, and the specter of AIDS. Is there any hope for communal care?
There’s so much nostalgia in popular culture for the 1990s right now, and in writing
Sketchtasy I wanted to work against that. Because I think nostalgia replaces all the nuance and messiness, the contradictions and possibilities, with a whitewashed product ready for mass consumption...