I Remember

‘In simple, forthright, declarative sentences, he charts the map of the human soul … I Remember is both uproariously funny and deeply moving.’ Paul Auster‘I would make a case for I Remember as one of the twenty or so most important American autobiographies, important for its air of unimportance and for its mingling of cultural bric-a-brac with sexual frankness and self-revelation.’ New Yorker ‘Completely original.’ Edmund White ‘Buy it, for everyone you know … I can’t think of a more original or lovely book.’ Olivia Laing ‘Joe Brainard discovered a memory machine.’ Siri Hustvedt ‘It’s a great work that will last and last - in other words, it is literature.’ James Shuyler ‘Astonishing … a relentlessly specific time-capsule of a book, which bizarrely, movingly, seems to slip the confines of time.’ Daily Telegraph ‘A landmark work for so many memoirists.’ Adelle Stripe

Joe Brainard grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and moved to New York when he was eighteen, where he became a vital presence in the city’s art and poetry scenes of the 1960s and 1970s. He died in 1994.

Olivia Laing is a writer and critic. They are the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Crudo and The Garden Against Time. In 2018, they were awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction and in 2017, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Laing’s books have been translated into twenty-one languages.