Name: Hola Papi
Rating: 4.208333333333333 (12 reviews)
ISBN: 9781982141493

John Paul Brammer

The popular LGBTQ advice columnist and writer presents a memoir-in-essays chronicling his journey growing up as a queer, mixed-race kid in America's heartland to becoming the "Chicano Carrie Bradshaw" of his generation.

How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

Hola Papi

Daniel Lindquist

I could have both lives; the reality, of course, was that I had neither.

But I didn't want to find out, because finding out would remove the possibility of what if.

Sometimes, Addicted, you have to just let a person roll down to the mouth of your driveway, turn their blinker on, and go.

What if, Loveless, memory is an act of creation? Our brains don't hold perfect records of the things that have happened, a Rolodex we can cycle through and call upon for official accounts. Maybe remembering is the same thing as imagining.

I'm not sure that person exists at all. I think there are simply important people in our lives. They don't always stay important. They don't always stick around. But the point at which we meet them, the point on the grid where our lives intersect, is a sacred thing. 

But that's one thing about life, Unapologetic. Things can always, always get worse.

That was me: a weird-ass tree that had groWn up, around, and in spite of Cache, in spite of Dillon, bending myself around obstacles ever after they had long disappeared. 

Here is the difference between two animals: wolves howl at the moon and people make up stories about the moon. We can't live without stories. 

Tada

“I find that looking, remembering, observing, is an active thing, it is a creative thing, and I am an agent in it.”<br /><br />Being a big fan of John Paul Brammer from his columns (RIP INTO magazine), his writing in this book has managed to both envelope me with warmth and intervene myself with a huge magnifying glass. It came at the right time, right when doubt has taken over my way of thinking. Brammer invited me to his rumination of being and living, through the past experiences that he’d had. But above all, it provides the same sense of healing as to when I first read the ¡Hola Papi! column years ago. 

Elizabeth

Deyana

I've been following @JPBrammer on Twitter for a long time, or at least it feels like it, though in reality it has probably only been a couple of years. I have one of his newsletters starred and in a folder titled “Remember Who You Are” in my inbox, because I’m nostalgic and melodramatic—an unfortunate combination for emotional stability but a good starting point for writing, I guess. There’s a lot to look at and read in this life, especially if we have the tools to do so online. It’s overwhelming. And I’m so glad that somehow, between that tide of tweets and past Skype messages and future TikToks, that somewhere and somewhen I read a Brammer tweet, or someone I followed followed him as well, and that days and months and years later I’d be holding his book in my hands. How finite of a moment—I hope I carry it with me and cherish it despite the recurring tide. Perhaps I won’t have to hope too hard, though. These stories aren’t ones to forget.

Hola Papi How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

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