Artwork by Joe Brainard. Edited by Ron Padgett.
Cultural Writing. Gay and Lesbian Studies. "I REMEMBER is both uproariously funny and deeply moving. It is also one of the few totally original books I have ever read" — Paul Auster. "Joe Brainard's memories of growing up in the '40s and '50s have universal appeal. He catalogues his past in terms of fashions and fads, public events and private fantasies, with such honesty and accuracy and in such abundance that, sooner or later, his history coincides with ours and we are hooked" — The Village Voice.
A small but real American classic. -- Dwight Garner The New York Times
Though the book never strains for psychological insight or a totalizing worldview, its mix of naive wonder and deathbed reflection feels like its own kind of wisdom. -- Andrew Chan Bookforum
Joe Brainard (1942-1994) left Tulsa at eighteen for New York City and soon became a part of the thriving downtown art scene and the New York School of poets and painters. Over his career, Brainard created a prodigious body of work, distinguished by its breadth, originality, and rare alchemy of sensuality and precision, sophistication and sweetness. Admired for his writing as well as his visual art, Brainard wrote the legendary and beloved memoir I REMEMBER, which was hailed as "a masterpiece" by Paul Auster and inspired George Perec's Je me souviens. Brainard's drawings, assemblages, collages,
Joe Brainard's I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic, praised and admired by writers from Paul Auster to John Ashery and Edmund White. As autobiography, Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain "I remember": "I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail." Brainard's enduring gem of a book has been issued in various forms over the past thirty years. In 1970, Angel Hair books published the first edition of I Remember , which quickly sold out; he wrote two subsequent volumes for Angel Hair, More I Remember (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both of which proved as popular as the original. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York published Brainard's I Remember Christmas , a new text for which he also contributed a cover design and four drawings. Excerpts from the Angel Hair editions appeared in Interview , Gay Sunshine , The World and the New York Herald . Then in 1975, Full Court Press issued a revised version collecting all three of the Angel Hair volumes and added new material, using the original title I Remember . This complete edition is prefaced by poet and translator Ron Padgett.
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