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.

Prince is very much a presence in this little volume...Nonetheless, My Pinup is more about Als—about one queer Black man’s real and imagined relationship to an artist whose career spanned much of his life.

Als’s writing in My Pinup melds the critical with the autobiographical.

... a strange hybrid that blends the fragmented story of Als’ fraught romance with his 'sensitive, ‘understanding’ white boyfriend' with dreamlike images that read more like poetry than prose.

A triumph of loving erudition and studied panache conveying Als’ passion for the mercurial musical powerhouse who was known as Prince.

Als brings serpentine prose and acerbic wit to this slim, two-part take on Prince, desire, and loss.

At fewer than 50 pages, this book is too short to address Prince’s protean nature in depth. But as an appreciation of the liberating power he had over Als as a gay Black man, it’s undeniably engrossing.