Kevin Killian’s Memoirs of Sexed-Up, Boozy Long Island
Kevin Killian. Photo: Peter E. Hanff.
Every time I feel fascination
I just can’t stand still.
—David Bowie, “Fascination”
Born on Christmas Eve, 1952, in a hamlet on Long Island, Kevin Killian began his first novel, , in June 1974, after he graduated from Fordham Lincoln Center, a small liberal arts college in Midtown Manhattan. It wasn’t released for another fifteen years, until the Crossing Press—based in Freedom, California—published a small edition in 1989. That same year also saw the publication of Killian’s first memoir, . “Freedom,” George Michael crooned a few months later. “I think there’s something you should know.” What? Didn’t everything happen in 1989? The year the world began and the year it ended, too. Where had Killian been in those intervening fifteen years? Both books place him near his hometown: “I lived in the upstairs flat of a summer bungalow on the North Shore of Long Island,” opens. It concludes with a place and a date, what might even be read as a declaration: “San Francisco, September 18, 1988.” “I grew up in Smithtown,” he begins in, “a suburb of New York, a town so invidious that I still speak of it in Proustian terms—or Miltonic terms, a kind of paradise I feel
