Review by Booklist Review
Award-winning writer and performer Oliver's first book is a heady mix of personal essays, overheard conversations, and diary entries about life and love in New York City. These vignettes can be read singly, in handfuls, or from cover to cover. Single, gay, and edgily humorous, Oliver provides brief accounts of graphic hookups, often with strangers. One is with an Australian flight attendant with a fetish for outie belly buttons and a passion for frolicking in a dolphin suit, giving new meaning to swimming with dolphins in what Oliver describes as the most personal impersonal thing I've ever experienced. When not writing about sex, weird and otherwise, Oliver recalls his adolescence and his years working in a theater's box office, and offers recipes for lonely dinners featuring 1-2 tears because of the onions and hard truths. This brickwork collection of experiences which range from funny to self-pitying and astute, if not consistently incisive forms an oddly affecting and effective assemblage, rather like Picasso's cubist portraits. Oliver's collection will please fans of David Sedaris and David Rakoff.--Scott, Whitney Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Oliver (Showgasm) provides a mediocre entry in the genre of self-deprecating New York Gay men looking for love and finding humor instead, though it certainly has its bright spots. His chatty style and candor about sex is entertaining, as when he dedicates an entire paragraph to actor Ryan Phillippe, who "justified and fortified [Oliver's] gayness." His comic humiliations, such as his experiences with gagging on a dust-covered sexual device, dating a furry, and getting spanked by a scruffy Italian guy, illustrate what Oliver will do for possible love. He also includes anecdotes about essays about bizarre subway rides and outrageous episodes from his day job at a theater box office. Too much of the book contains uninspired doodles such as a series of odes ("love poems") for attractive strangers he encounters in New York and "recipes" for loneliness, leaving the reader longing for more substance. Oliver certainly has comedic talent, but this haphazard collection quickly wears thin. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A gay writer reflects on his life as a single man on the prowl for sex and connection in New York City. Oliver first moved to the city to attend college. But it wasn't until after he graduated that he "started hooking up" with the colorful strangers he describes in this offbeat collection of wickedly humorous essays, sketches, and poems about urban life and love. Intimacy typically came in the form of one-night stands with men he found on Internet websites like Manhunt or mobile apps like "Grindr, Scruff, and Tindr." The menlike the married lawyer from Connecticut, the "Broadway understudy under whom [he] studied for a night," or the Australian flight attendant with a fetish for dressing up as a dolphinwere as unique as they were transient. When Oliver wasn't scoring dates or sexting with men online or handing out his telephone number to the "bartenders, waiters and merchandise managers at Broadway musicals," he was busy fantasizing about hot men on the subway. Hit-and-run as his relationships were, Oliver did occasionally think about marriage. Yet when he or his sex partners tried to communicate a desire for closeness, neither side could respond with complete acceptance. When the author tried to kiss a neighborhood hookup, the man "pulled away [and] smiled politely." When a hockey player began calling Oliver out of loneliness and despair over being diagnosed with Huntington's disease, Oliver could only listen and offer no comfort. Only after a sexless encounter with another gay writer at an artists' colony in New Hampshire did the author finally find an unacknowledged mirror for himself and his actions. The writer had plenty of opportunities for sex but not "plenty of people to confide in, people to feel close to"just like Oliver himself, who was caught in the ceaselessly carnival-esque flow of big-city life. In-your-face funny but with surprisingly moving moments. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
