Dennis Cooper

"I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can't handle." For most of his life, Dennis Cooper believed the person he had loved the most and would always love above all others was George Miles. In his first novel in ten years, Dennis Cooper writes about George Miles, love, loss, addiction, suicide, and how fiction can capture these things, and how it fails to capture them. Candid and powerful, I Wished is a radical work of shifting forms. It includes appearances by Santa Claus, land artist James Turrell, sentient prairie dogs, John Wayne Gacy, Nick Drake, and George, the muse for Cooper's acclaimed novels Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period, collectively known as "The George Miles Cycle." In revisiting the inspiration for the Cycle, Dennis has written a masterwork: the most raw, personal, and haunted book of his career.

I Wished

From what I have read of Cooper so far, Closer, Guide, and The Sluts, I failed to ‘get’ his message. Like yes, I understand that of course all the books in the cycle (although I would say this is replicated in The Sluts as well) form this violent, cynical, pornographic wall that allows Cooper to avoid talking about his true feelings, but there always was this sort of tinge of hope in his writing that I couldn’t quite place. Even Cooper acknowledges this: in Guide, we witness a man carve out a junkie’s asshole hoping to find gold, fame, God, or death, but all he finds is shit. For the most part, this is what the Cycle felt like to me. Carving, deforming, and beating cute boys in a Hail Mary attempt of finding truth, only to find a pile of shit. I Wished, in contrast, breaks this kayfabe entirely. You watch a class clown-an obsessive, creepy, yet determined writer attempt to write some sort of eulogy/self-eulogy. And the only way Cooper finds of achieving this satisfactory conclusion is by turning George into the immovable and infinite. He is not just a crater, but the flowing lave which formed the ground he stepped upon until his premature death. 

Riley

Shivam

7.5

With an absolute refusal of traditional storytelling conventions, I Wished seems a fitting tribute to the equally complicated person it's written in memory of. 

But then again, if there's one takeaway from the book it's that you and I, as readers, never truly know. What reaches us is only a filtered out version of the writer's intention, which we then mix with our own experiences to make it digestible. We'll never know if it is a fitting tribute or if it falls short or if it's as close as it could be.

The chaotic narrative - if it can be called that - switches from one point to the next with no regards to time or place. It feels like going through a photo album all out of place, that can only make sense to the people in the pictures. But this does not mean it's not worth looking at as an outsider. If nothing else, I Wished is honest, it translates the messiness of a lived experience into the messiness of words as well as I've ever seen anywhere.

Mary Marshall

i’m reading the george miles cycle super out of order but this is so vulnerable and strange and i really enjoyed it

I Wished

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