I Can Give You Anything But Love

“Beautifully written, Gary Indiana’s ‘memoir’ is one of his greatest books: a heartbreaking, astringently accurate account of the tidal shifts between the American 20th and 21st centuries. Indiana is one of the smartest, most truthful writers living today.” —Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia and After Kathy Acker“Gary Indiana’s memoir is written with both laconic distance and a sense of urgency. It is comic and then almost melancholy. He can create memorable characters and dramatic moments in stylish sentences that seem effortless. But, more than anything, this book is a display of a personality that is sardonic and sharp, fiercely intelligent, vulnerable and original.” —Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island“I Can Give You Anything but Love recounts the wicked adventures of old Gary in Cuba and young Gary living dangerously in the demimondes of LA, San Francisco, Boston, and New York, in prose so conversant and apt it’s like a superpower, like ease in a foreign element, breathing underwater or flying. Fueled by Swiftian indignation at our unbelievable stupidity, accuracy is a kind of revenge on a world that declines to return our love. Young Gary suffers the opposite of an education: he unlearns till all that remains is chaos and invisibility. He respects beautiful flesh and friendship’s damaged utopia as he encounters others who are also desperate, brilliant, and sometimes famous.” —Robert Glück, author of About Ed “Gossipy and acerbic, raunchy and unsentimental, I Can Give You Anything but Love defies the conventional moods and gestures of memoir to give us a portrait of the young man who will become Gary Indiana: one of the most gifted, most uncompromising writers of our era.” —Ryan Ruby, author of The Zero and the One

GARY INDIANA is a novelist and critic who has chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth century. From Horse Crazy (1989), a tale of feverish love set against the backdrop of downtown New York amid the AIDS epidemic, to Do Everything in the Dark (2003), “a desolate frieze of New York’s aging bohemians,” Indiana’s novels mix horror and bathos, grim social commentary with passages of tenderest, frailest desire. With 1997’s Resentment- A Comedy, Indiana began his true crime trilogy, following up with Three Month Fever- The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999) and Depraved Indifference (2002). Together, the three novels show the most vicious crimes in our nation’s history to be only American pathologies personified. In 2015, Indiana published his acclaimed anti-memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love and later the novel Gone Tomorrow. Called one of “the most brilliant critics writing in America today” by the London Review of Books, “the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society” by Jamaica Kincaid, and “one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche” by the Guardian, Gary Indiana remains both inimitable and impossible to pin down.

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