Memories That Smell like Gasoline

Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is David Wojnarowicz’s memoir of childhood and adolescence amidst the AIDS epidemic, saturated with the air of desperation and the specter of violence. Wojnarowicz appears here as an abused child, an adolescent prostitute, an adult living with HIV. The book is preoccupied with ruins and ruination; the impulse to make public different lives and desires; the insistence on pleasure, and the implication of politics in pleasure—the themes that contoured Wojnarowicz’s life and work. What comes forth is language as desolate as a world that wanted him dead, and an insistence on life in spite of it.