You know from the start that it is building towards Thomas James' death, and you really understand how the narrator wants to hold off getting there and telling a death they weren't there for as much as they want to unfold the story. The book is also a knowing wink towards writing and autofiction, considering what is memory and story even when something is meant to be 'what happened', but this is combined with exploits and community and stumbling into things whilst young in ways that stop it just feeling like a book about writing a book.

Meanwhile, the narrator embarks on another internal shift — one for which, even years later, Leapling remains a touchstone: JJ was in love once, that is what they suppose, though it’s with uncertainty & something like a catharsis that they type out a book formatted recollection of their time with the man who was an obtuse villain whom everyone enjoyed sexually encountering but whom no one desired to know on a deeper level. Perchance should you wonder, as JJ does, what is deeper than the confines of our physical insides, I feel that the discussion is pointless. There are two sides of the same coin & neither is necessarily wrong. One can be in love with a soul, a body, an entity’s whole; none of it really matters because in the end we can drop dead at the flip of a crusted silver dime & be gone forever after. You see, it came over me like a compulsion, like food poisoning, like a scream in the dark tearing me violently from a dream: the exhortation to finally put this down on paper.JJ was a transgender performer and writer. He describes a hapless dalliance with a gorgeous lover (first love) from London.

As well as some incredible moments of emotional clarity on the part of the narrator that speak so broadly and movingly to the nature of queerness itself: From an electrifying new voice, a "stone-cold masterpiece" (Olivia Laing) of queer friendship, first love, and unbridled youth. Many of the lifestyle descriptions reminded me how peacefully quiet - and very different my own life is. It’s four in the morning, and our narrator is walking home from the club when they realise that it’s February 29th - the birthday of the man who was something like their first love. Piecing together art, letters and memory, they set about trying to write the story of a doomed affair that first sparked and burned a decade ago.Ten years earlier, our young narrator and a boy named Thomas James fall into bed with one another over the summer of their graduation. Their ensuing affair, with its violent, animal intensity and its intoxicating and toxic power plays initiates a dance of repulsion and attraction that will cross years, span continents, drag in countless victims-and culminate in terrible betrayal. It's four in the morning, and our narrator is walking home from the club when they realize the date is February 29th-the birthday of the man who was something like their first love. Piecing together art, letters, and memory, they set about trying to write the story of a doomed affair that first sparked and burned a decade ago.