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Maybe someday
40
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
13/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Hilton Als
Publisher:
New Directions
Date:
November 1, 2022
Marrying the memoir and essay forms while exploring desire, Prince, and racism, Hilton Als's My Pinup expands and delivers love.
What The Reviewers Say
My Pinup, is concerned with Als’s past selves and past loves, refracted through and tested against the pop icon. The memoir weaves between accounts of and encounters with Prince, as well as two boyfriends.
Als writes to reconcile the twin Princes and finds it nearly impossible without the intervention of a third interlocutor, a quieter love. I close this book only to loop it in search of the center of its knot of nerves and detachment. It’s a song, a ballad with aching techno undertones and a popular thread we can all recognize—projecting silence onto the thoughts of the dead and famous, who, when we pin them just right, are interchangeable, the carrion of our most frightening desires, souls we must devour to hide the fear that will otherwise devour us. We appropriate those who we deem pinups so we don’t have to witness what they tell us when we let them speak backstage. Prince is the commodity or pinup who speaks and combats the fantasy with ideas of his own. Als is able to allow that psychic distance between him and his would-be lover here, but Prince can’t quite achieve permission to not be one single being. He’s an idea propelling the culture forward before he’s a man.
An often cryptically personal text, My Pinup occasionally addresses the late artist directly.
My Pinup does not disappoint.
