A funny book about HIV/AIDS? Bobby Finger did it.
Plus queer fiction recommendations and a chat with the author
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It seems wrong to say this, which is exactly why I’m going to: I found a book about the HIV/AIDS crisis that is funny.
Stay with me here.
The book is called Four Squares and it’s by Bobby Finger, author of The Old Place. With Four Squares, Bobby performs a delicate dance, bringing us close to the savagery of the AIDS crisis while also zeroing in on the regular, sometimes mundane lives ordinary people lived in the early nineties
We’ve read books about fighting for survival, waiting for new treatments, and watching friends die, but what Bobby asked himself while writing a book was: What did people do for work? What did they do when they got home from work? Where did they find solace when they were lonely?
Four Squares follows Artie, a gay writer living in New York City in 19921 who, on the night of his thirtieth birthday, meets a man named Abe. You could call this an enemies to lovers trope, though the book is less about the relationship between Artie and Abe and more about everything that came after.
We also see Artie thirty years later when he learns that his chosen family — Abe’s daughter and ex-wife — are moving across the country. Feeling bereft and realizing he’s quite lonely, he becomes involved with a center for queer seniors called GALS (which I learned from the author is based on a real-life center called SAGE).
Artie’s time with the fun and wild elders at GALS is heartwarming and possibly life-saving, as Artie recreates what he has lost over the years and redefines what it means to be in community.
The book is hopeful and funny, but it also reads like an authentic account of the AIDS crisis; a look at the ordinary side of the early nineties, when treatments were coming around and gay men were realizing they might actually have a future.
In anticipation of Four Squares coming out in paperback this week, I got to chat with Bobby about the book! He’s wonderful and genuine, and a member of the queer community himself, Bobby has the unique ability to write with both the distance of time and the authenticity of belonging.
Enjoy our chat — it was so much fun. And don’t miss Bobby’s queer fiction recommendations at the end.
KOLINA CICERO: One of my favorite things about Four Squares is how important community is in it. Artie finds community with his friends, with GALS, with romantic partners. Tell me what community means to you and where you find it.
BOBBY FINGER: I have a good relationship with my family, but when I moved far away, the closest ties I had were people I went to school with, and there were just a couple of them — and they were all straight. There was a specific moment when I realized I needed a queer community, and that takes effort because you're trying to find people you can relate to on a completely different level. When I started actively trying to build a queer community of people, I found it so fulfilling. I was cultivating relationships that were going through these ups and downs and fraught times and wonderful times, and I think that’s so emblematic of closeness and realness and family. These friendships take work, and they're also the ones that are the most satisfying and gratifying.
While building this queer community, a friend told me about SAGE, an organization designed specifically to help older members of the queer community. My friend volunteered there and I just thought it was incredible. I was like, if I see myself living in New York for forever (which I do now), I'm going need a place like this. I learned about SAGE right before the pandemic, and for the bulk of the pandemic I did a weekly call with an older person in the queer community. We just talked on the phone, it was so great. He just wanted someone to talk to. I know that at some point I'm going be old and in my little crummy apartment and I’m just going to want someone to talk to like that.
For the book, I was really drawn to this idea of a story about queer friendship in all of these very distinct phases. Like how you have it so good when you're young, then when you have to start over again after you're kind of rusty at it, and then how wonderful it can be to find community no matter how old you are. I couldn't have written this book 10 years ago. I needed the experience of actually finding and cultivating and understanding the bliss of finding a chosen family. I say that more broadly because it doesn't have to be queer people at all. It’s the people you find that end up being so crucial to your life.
Something I thought was demonstrated so purely and beautifully in the book was what you can do with community to overcome difficulties.
We can only depend on each other. If we're not going to depend on money flowing in, all we have is each other. There was a recent volunteer event I went to for SAGE and it was like, look at everything that we're losing from the administration, but also look at all we have! One of my hopes for this novel is that it teaches people that SAGE exists and is something everyone should invest in if they can. I hope it’s something that’s infectious to people.
There’s a popular novel about the AIDS crisis that takes place in the 80s. The author is a straight woman. In that sense, I found your book to be more impactful. Can you share your thoughts on who has the authority to write stories like these?
When it comes to queer fiction, I have opinions that may not be rational. I read a lot of queer fiction, and during my research I read so much nonfiction about the AIDS crisis during the eighties and early nineties. If I was going to write about this time period, I wanted to be able to write about it with respect and with as much authority as I possibly could.
Sometimes I read good novels by people who are trying to write about that time but who don't have that personal connection to the material. I am never going be the person who says you can't write about whatever you want — everyone should write about whatever they want! — but I tend to prefer the books that are written by members of the gay community, specifically when we’re talking about books about gay people in the 1980s.
If that's read with shade, it's not my intention. I'm just speaking to personal opinion. When I was thinking about writing this book, I got really nervous. You want to be as respectful as you possibly can about this defining moment of your community that has these reverberations that we're still seeing play out today. I did as much reading as I could, and the books I found most helpful and moving were the ones that were written during that time; the books written by the people who lived it. That's why it was so intimidating to write this book. I was like, I can't step out of my lane! I want people to leave feeling really good about themselves, and so many of the books I read about this do not end like that because … just think of the context. So I was like, how am I going to do this? Is there even a respectful way to write about it? It was an intimidating, harrowing experience for me because I did not want to mess it up. And when people say oh, the book is so funny, I'm like, oh my god, I made a funny book about HIV/AIDS. Is that okay? And ultimately I do think it is.
Back to that book. I would never disparage that author, I'm glad she wrote the book, I love the book, but it's like — why did she write that book?
I have some questions for her! (But I really did love that book.) What kept you writing this story, despite the fear?
I think every writer goes through this at some point, when they’re like, am I the right person to write this story story? I didn't set Four Squares in the peak of the AIDS crisis, I set it in the early nineties, when treatments started getting good and for the first time in essentially a decade of these survivors’ lives, they had to contend with the fact that they have a future. They spent all these years thinking they didn’t have a future, and this is the first time where the fog dissipates and they have to imagine themselves as people who are getting older and it's messing them up.
I chose that time because I knew I couldn’t write honestly about the peak of when people were dying. That's traumatizing, and there's so much nuance to it that I will never understand. But I think I can understand that period after, where you're coping with the wreckage and having to build a life for yourself. We're so used to reading these traumatic accounts of what these people went through, but what I wanted to capture was the banalities of regular life. What were they doing when they got home from work? What was their work like?
When I was doing research, I went to the Library of Congress because I wanted this specific book of documents. I ended up getting denied, but the archivist asked what I was working on. I told him about the book and he was like, oh, I’ve got just the box. Librarians are the fucking best. So he brings me this cart of six huge boxes filled with the very recently donated papers of a prolific writer from the time who’s still alive today. Over the course of a couple days, I shuffled through all of this guy's correspondences with old boyfriends and his friends and his work. He was a gay guy with a really cool job in magazines, and he never got AIDS. He was the lucky one, just making it through, but also all his friends were dying. Just the act of looking through all of this stuff and knowing that he had deliberately donated it so that someone like me could look through it — it was very reassuring. This is what the history's here for, so do something with it.
The guy had a friend who loved doing movie nights, and I wrote a character who reminds me so much of this real person. And I realized I did something authentic here. It was the best moment of the writing process, this accidental affirmation that there were people like this living lives like this, so why not write a book about people like this?
What queer fiction recommendations can you give us?
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One by Kristen Arnett | Kristen writes the weirdest and funniest stuff. This is about a love affair with a lesbian magician and it is so strange and so moving. She writes like very strange stuff and it’s never isolating.
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst | This is my favorite book.
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst | This book is incredible, I read it in about a day.
Family Meal by Bryan Washington | Bryan is a former food writer and those are just two of my favorite things — queer people and food. He delivers every time. He has a new one coming out this year [Palaver], which I haven’t read yet.
The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey | It’s kind of half novel, half memoir, then in the middle it transforms into something that completely re-contextualizes what happens in the first half. She’s one of the most interesting writers I can think of, and she always writes the longest, most beautiful sentences. Her book Biography of X is one of the best things I’ve ever read in my life.
I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters
When you're reading, do you annotate or underline?
I’m a big underliner. I don't understand people who won't mark up a book. I'm like, you're weird. I underline and then I always do a star so that if I’m flipping through, I can see the pages I called out. That’s a trick of mine. How often am I really revisiting them? Rarely. But it's nice when I want to. I'm also a big highlighter because I read a ton on NetGalley. Then at the end of the book, you've got your whole list of highlights.
June is both Pride and the release of the paperback for Four Squares! How are you celebrating?
I just think it's so nice that the paperback is coming out during Pride. I really want to see someone reading the paper back of Four Squares on the train during Pride month. I think that'd be the most amazing thing in the world. But I haven't seen it.2
My friends throw a dance party for queer people in Brooklyn every three months and they’re doing one for Pride. I'm not really a dancer and I'm not really a going out kind of guy, but I really like this event because I know so many people there. So it’s kind of like I'm just seeing my friends and it's fine if I'm not the one with the best floor routine.
I loved chatting with Bobby so much. He’s just as fun and lovely as his book. Get your paperback copy of Four Squares here.
Did you make it this far? You are a champion. French philosopher Simone Weil said attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Thank you for your generosity.
What are you reading? What are you underlining?
What I’m reading: Write Through It: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life by
What I’m underlining: [Write Through It]: “You do not have to write every day. I do not write every day. I can’t. I have a full-time job and a kid and a compulsive need to watch mediocre Instagram Reels and this pesky desire to leave the house sometimes and also get at least seven hours of sleep a night. If you do not or cannot write every day, you are not any less of a writer.”
Love, Kolina
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Someone make this happen for Bobby!
What an absolutely delightful interview! I loved the story about the librarian and the research that interaction yielded. Using humor as part of telling a difficult story takes skill, and I’m now excited to read the book. I also especially appreciated having some queer book recommendations. Many thanks!