Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s Paperback – Import, 19 April 2016

Brad Gooch, the author of exemplary biographies of the poet Frank O'Hara and the Southern writer Flannery O'Connor, has now created a haunting, raw, yet elegant portrait of his life in New York City in those seemingly mythical days of the 1970s and early 1980s, with all of its promise and freedom and energy. Gooch's lover, film director Howard Brookner, was charismatic, a man described to me by someone as a Pied Piper of pleasure--aesthetic, sensual, intellectual. A heady life existed for these two men, amidst the steam of creativity and ambition that rose from those times. Eventually, AIDS enters their lives, and one of many triumphs of this book is that the timeline of events is presented boldly and coolly: This book never becomes maudlin, never pulls strings that might manipulate your emotions--Gooch presents, with very little defense, his life and its effects, and you will be aware of the tenuous connections in which we all live, and how only memory, artfully presented, can preserve those we loved. "Smash Cut," which is written with the smooth precision of film spinning through the hands of a skillful editor, acts as a bouquet of roses placed on a grave in which the years have been preserved, and as you close the pages of the book and walk with the memory of it in your head, the petals fly about you for days.

Very moving and well written. Evocative of an era in NYC and in gay life which is gone now.

Brad Gooch writes with surprising honesty about his turbulent and ambiguous relationship with the director Howard Brookner, who tragically died from AIDS at the age of 34 just after making his first Hollywood movie. It's a deeply moving book, the last chapters of which will literally drive you to tears. SMASH CUT offers an incredibly moving and insightful autopsy of a deeply flawed love affair that neither Gooch nor Brookner could give up, even when it interfered with their careers and separate love lives. One of the most authentic accounts of a tragic friendship - and a worthy tribute to a gifted filmmaker who died too soon to fulfil his potential.

What a wonderful memoir of gay NYC in the 1970s/1980s! Vibrant, passionate and, in the end, heart-breaking, just like the city itself. A beautiful love story, highly recommended.

Wonderful