In Conversation: Wayne Koestenbaum & Chelsea Hopper
“My lover, the rabbi, his cock smaller than mine, we weren't measuring, we weren't in competition, when he came his fluid got caught in his pubic hair and created a sunset effect, a cloud, a confusion, not unlike Courbet's L'Origine du monde, but inverted.”
Wayne Koestenbaum is a prolific American writer, poet, critic, and artist who is capable of making absolutely anything — opera, Harpo Marx, Jackie Onassis, humiliation, corpse pose — interesting. His first novel in nearly twenty years, My Lover, The Rabbi, was published earlier this year. The book is a gay romance centred on an unnamed narrator and his consuming attachment to a rabbi burdened by death and responsibility.
It is populated by a litany of minor characters whose actions propel the story in increasingly unpredictable directions. It is a tale that unfolds through a succession of short, bitey chapters. Koestenbaum’s flirty, artful use of commas, like eyelashes, creates sudden leaps of association that can leave a reader feeling, at once, engulfed and surrounded. He wrote it by hand in a series of coloured notebooks beginning in August 2024, finishing the first draft forty-one days later, on his birthday. The biblical timing is fitting for a tale preoccupied with the complications of devotion and desire.
I spoke with Koestenbaum in mid-March, during the lead-up to the novel’s release. Spoilers lie ahead.
—Chelsea Hopper
Exclusive to the Magazine
In Conversation: Wayne Koestenbaum & Chelsea Hopper by Chelsea Hopper and Wayne Koestenbaum is featured in full in Issue 5 of Memo magazine.
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Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet, critic, novelist, artist, and performer who has published more than twenty books of poetry, criticism, fiction, and memoir, including My Lover, the Rabbi, Camp Marmalade, The Pink Trance Notebooks, Hotel Theory, Humiliation, and Jackie Under My Skin.
Chelsea Hopper is a curator and writer. She is Art Director of Memo magazine.
