[laughs]

I was relieved and even complimented.

Appearing to, to be normal was a frantic assignment.

He was totally normal, an asshole jock.

I was more attracted to his dumb muscles than to her meager body, though I easily related to her suffering, her fingers twisting in dread.

Edward Hopper said, "What I..." A, a lot of this ab- about domesticity, queer domesticity.

Edward Hopper said, "What I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house." Is that sentimental? I see the side of my house from my bed.

[laughs]

So could we just maybe start by talking about why O'Hara emerged as such an important ancestor or guiding light to these three books and New Narrative in general? Sure.

Okay.

When I was later in college, I found the Donald Allen anthology, The New American Poets.

It's an anthology, actually, that O'Hara helped create.

And it was the Bible of my generation.

And at that time, learning to be a writer... and learning to be a gay man were almost the same thing, at least for me.

And it would be hard to overestimate the effect of that anthology on young queer writers struggling with finding an identity in the 60s.

I'm just desperate to hear your Dietrich