A Friend of Dorothy's by Richard Willett

"We have all the time in the world, my sweet beautiful man."

It was the ending that scared off even gay editors back in the day. The last chapter of playwright Richard Willett's controversial lost novel of the eighties is an intimate victory dance of overt gay male sexuality at a time when not just silence = death, but for many sex = death. Now, perhaps, readers will be more open to celebrating it.

It's 1986 in New York City and 27-year-old Eric Summerfield knows that "yuppies" are supposed to be obnoxious, easily dismissed, but he envies the clarity of their delusions, their seeming ability to keep mortality at bay. He yearns, in fact, to be one of them. The catch: He's no Wall Street insider, but instead the underpaid employee of a Canadian chain bookstore in Midtown Manhattan, a Canuck himself, and gay, and AIDS suddenly seems to be everywhere, including in the body of his flamboyant friend and coworker Dale, who inexplicably singles out a reluctant Eric to be his chief caregiver. It's an experience that will change both of them.

Moving back and forth across time and place from youth in the 1960s and '70s-Eric's in Vancouver, Dale's on a farm in Kansas-to the pressure cooker of New York in the gay eighties, A Friend of Dorothy's is also a timeless, universal coming of age novel, in which the crucible of illness compels one young man to reach for something greater.

PRAISE FOR A Friend of Dorothy's

STARRED REVIEW: “Willett depicts Dale’s illness in unflinching detail but avoids maudlin sentimentality—almost until the end, Dale remains a spirited, bitchy, shrewd, and charismatic man, and his and Eric’s recollections paint a vibrant portrait of gay life in the late 1970s. Writing with a hangdog wit (‘Was it maybe true that the only way Eric could feel relaxed at a party was if the host had a terminal illness?’), Willett manages the difficult task of making an AIDS story funny; then, through a skillful accretion of matter-of-fact details, he vividly conveys the pathos of Dale’s decline and Eric’s fumbling, tender response. Readers will be laughing through their tears.”—Kirkus Reviews

EDITOR’S PICK: “Although A FRIEND OF DOROTHY’S was completed in 1991 and captures the emotional turmoil of a gay man’s sexual awakening during the height of AIDS with nuance and immediacy, playwright Willett’s urgent novel doesn’t easily fit into genre conventions. . . . But his greatest strength is depicting the pain and bliss of male bodies: Eric’s torturous childhood treatment for scoliosis; Dale’s physical and mental decline, rendered as a tableau of escalating humiliations; and a chapter explicitly detailing Eric’s encounters with a lover committed to showing him pleasure. Even though Willett’s protagonist is awash in fear, after a lifetime of thwarted and misdirected desire, sexual fulfillment is a revelation, and he comes to epitomize the mind/body disconnect that can lead people to deny their full humanity. TAKEAWAY: Powerful novel of queer self-discovery amid the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York.”—Publishers Weekly’s BookLife

"Nothing can have prepared you for the wit and insight, the eccentricity and inspiring optimism with which this consistently surprising young writer depicts a year at the heart of his generation's greatest calamity."—Joseph Pintauro, author of Cold Hands and Raft of the Medusa

"There is a knowingness, a sense of timing, a compassion and forgiveness under all the action, character to character. What Richard Willett has-in abundance-is love for the people he is chronicling and, by recording, saving."—Allan Gurganus, author of The Practical Heart, Plays Well with Others, and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

"The writing is poignant, realistic and fine; the reader is pierced and instantly seduced by the characters' appeal and immediacy."—Harlan Greene, author of The German Officer's Boy, What the Dead Remember, and Why We Never Danced the Charleston

Richard Willett's short stories have been published in Christopher Street, Hawaii Review, American Writing, Karamu, and Oxalis, among others, as well as short-listed for New American Library's Men on Men: Best New Gay Fiction, edited by David Bergman. His short play about AIDS Boys Will Be Boys was included in the anthology Art & Understanding: Literature from the First Twenty Years of A&U, and he is also the author of the plays Triptych, Random Harvest, The Flid Show, Tiny Bubbles, 9/10, A Terminal Event, and Grief at High Tide, presented off-off-Broadway and at theaters across the country. Honors include an Edward F. Albee Foundation Fellowship and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship, designation as a finalist for the Dramatists Guild National Fellows Program and the Sundance Labs, and listing twice in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Nicholl Top 50. He lives in West Hollywood, California.

Visit richardwillettwriter.com.