Synopses & Reviews
One of the most talked about, critically acclaimed books -- a savagely poetic meditation on love, death and cellular phones.
Each decade brings a great Hollywood novel, one breathtaking in its scope and originality, a story that captures the soul of its time. As the millennium approaches, that novel is Bruce Wagner's I'm Losing You.
Chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, I'm Losing You is set in a land of H.I.V.I.Ps, porn stars in love, scheming dermatologists, and cell-phone conversations that never connect. It is a place of celebrity chore-whores, masseurs, traitorous shrinks, syphilitic cantors, sightless children, and dying men who wear $400,000 watches. It's Hollywood, cordless and unplugged -- where the two most-heard comments are "I'm losing you..". and "I'll let you go".
With a sensibility that calls to mind Nashville (set in Tinseltown, as told by Virgil) -- from the prying eyes of Hard Copy to the babbling cellular matrix of darkest night -- Bruce Wagner charts the morbidity and mortality of a culture's current affairs, depicting the national obsession with fame and fortune -- truth and consequence -- as never before.
Review
"Bruce Wagner's...novel, I'm Losing You (1996), was a dark Walpurgisnacht of a book: a blackly satiric and sometimes very funny look at the damned denizens of Hollywood, a contemporary Sodom and Gomorrah, in the author's scabrous telling, peopled by sadistic movie bigwigs, social-climbing shrinks, delusional starlets, nefarious child molesters and smarmy hustlers of every imaginable ilk, all linked to one another in a nasty web of sex, corruption and mutual use and abuse. AIDS, cancer and an assortment of psychiatric problems pointed up that novel's obsession with illness and decay and death, even as the book's title (taken from the cellphone mantra chanted by drivers being disconnected as they enter bad cell zones) underscored a sense of loss, miscommunication and misplaced dreams." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
[Wagner] writes like a wizard....His prose writhes and coruscates. John Updike, The New Yorker
Review
Ferocious acuity. Outrageous....Dead-on in every way. Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Review
Superb....The authors images, tones, and language give Im Losing You a hard beauty that glints like black crystal. Time
Review
The years best book. Walter Kirn, New York magazine
Review
One of the years most notorious books....A must-read. Entertainment Weekly
Review
Ruthlessly hip and very funny. Wired
Review
Wagners latest novel makes all other Hollywood satires Capraesque in their innocence. Will Self
Review
Edgy, sublime. New York Newsday
Review
Mr. Wagner...treats us to many glorious phrases and whole passages that have the self-propelled rhythm of great prose. Adam Begley, The New York Observer
About the Author
Bruce Wagner is the author of the novels Force Majeure and Im Losing You. He recently wrote and directed Women in Film, adapted from his novel I'm Losing You. Women in Film was shown at the Sundance and Venice film festivals in 2001. He lives in Los Angeles.