The Fragmented Lives of Nate Lippen

In Wisconsin, a middle-aged man lies awake at night, haunted by memories of his dead friends. The friends were similar to him: working-class queers with histories of abandonment and abuse. While the causes of their deaths varied—AIDS, suicide, overdose, or a combination of the three—each could be traced to an inequity born of homophobia and societal neglect. “I want to be wrong. Wrong in a new way,” says the unnamed narrator of Nate Lippens’s 2021 debut, My Dead Book, after learning of yet another friend’s overdose and death. Life, as he knows it, has yet to prove him wrong.