This book is Glück's portrait of the artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai, his sometime lover, met in the seventies in San Francisco, when gay life emerged unabashedly from the closet. "I wanted to find in Ed something to latch on to that was outside my egotism and fear, my threadbare relation to the world-a leap through Ed into lyric time," Glück has said, and in this book that is both "a novel and my version of an AIDS memoir" he wanted to capture the full range of his feelings for Ed: "estranged from Ed, bored by him, moved by him." It is a book about the life they lived together-art and writing and family and sex and death-and, composed over many decades, it is also a book about how the past continues to change in memory and to charge the present.