reviewed by Lauren Walters
James Allen Hall’s I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well charts Hall’s path as a queer person growing up in 1980s Florida across a collection of lyric essays presented in a manner that evokes memoir. This collection traces the landmarks of Hall’s life, traversing events from Hall’s first crush to his mother’s numerous suicide attempts to his personal experience navigating complicated relationships. Resounding throughout the nine essays housed in this collection exists a tactful nuance and scathing vulnerability tempered by a tightly constructed voice that deftly weaves between humor, hope, and absolute horror. Attention to detail and flow marks this collection and fosters moments that crescendo to a striking forte, resting only momentarily before once again swelling into yet another wrenching sentiment. Hall’s carefully-forged casualness combined with the biting nature inherent to the covered topics entice readers to apply the de facto accolades of brave and raw so often attached to the queer narrative; however, this undermines the undeniable attention underpinning every sentence in the collection, a meticulous attentiveness which allows Hall to create a narrative that is, at once, incredibly personal but also transcendent in its ability to capture numerous fears and experiences shared within the queer community.
The collection fittingly finds its origin in an essay entitled “My First Time,” the simultaneous implication and ambiguity of which make space for an essay that is built upon juxtaposition. “My First Time” details Hall’s first serious crush, at the center of which is “the resident genius freak of Western High,” Jamie. Hall describes his infatuation with Jamie, professing the familiar feelings of a first crush: “I was blissful, I practiced combining my first name with his last name on notebook paper. I encoded symbols of my affection on modern-day papyrus while we studied ancient Egypt, I imagined him in togas during the Hellenistic period. Hall and Jamie delight in passing notes between classes in the hallway; however, the enduring watch of an unseen third party, the “greasy-haired boy” who monitored the “traffic of a love note between two guys” prompted another, more malicious first for Hall: his first time being called a slur. The sunshine-y tone characterizing the beginning of Hall’s essay quickly turns to capture the guttural nature of the occurrence as he recounts, “he wasn’t ugly; he was smiling, he was smaller than me by about four inches, he was so close he was going to kiss me. But then his hand shot to my shoulders, his lips opened, and he shoved ‘faggot’ onto me.” The care afforded to each individual sentence and the function of sound in the essay creates acerbic moments that stick because of their content but also, perhaps more so, because of their staggering presentation.
From the first essay to the last, this collection does not hesitate to show trenchant accounts of violence or the unsavory sides of familial relations; however, it would be a disservice to suggest that the work merely retells trauma from cover to cover. Between the many laden themes weaving throughout the essays, Hall makes space to capture the beauty and relief lent through his encounters with and evolving understanding of queer intimacy. Demonstrating the processes of exploration and identification, “End of Terror” situates the reader in Hall’s young adult years as he explores Orlando’s red-light district, where “men touch without fear.” Hall recalls the event—being taken to a hotel-nightclub by two friends—as a sort of rite of passage, cheekily mentioning “they’ve brought me to my first gay club, a fact they’d keep repeating in the car as they grinned at each other, as if they were about to hand over a decoder ring and my first copy of The Gay Agenda.” For much of the essay, the tone is imbued with a sense of humor, which allows the essay to remain light, despite its fraught subject matter, but in certain passages, Hall dials back on the humor to create moments of epiphany and identification that do not equivocate in their power or intensity:
The spectacle I find there shocks me: men having sex, making live scenes of the videos I keep at the bottom of my footlocker in my college dorm room. Men roll onto their stomachs, turning their faces toward the audience. We watch men tied to bedposts, their mouths agog, wincing from the stroke of the whip. Men on all fours, heads bowed. Hairy men shaved down, the body corrected. Blond men and brown-haired men, bald men, men of every ethnicity. Kneeling down, snaking their heads from all angles. Men holding other men by the jaw, pinching the nose closed so the mouth will open. Men lurching into other men, men receiving them. This is power: each man giving in, burning off his shame as he surrenders to another man’s fantasy.
Enveloping this moment is an emerging vitality and passion that is uncovered through the content and reverberates in the air-tight word choice and construction of the prose. The change in tone draws attention to this moment, a high point within the essay, where Hall finally encounters the validation he’s been seeking.
Still, Hall resists simplistic, tidy sentiments of identification and, instead, contends with the internal conflict of claiming a certain identity while simultaneously feeling out of place within that group. Despite the fact that Hall has known since childhood that he was gay, as he explores the nightclub, he experiences a distinct feeling of misplacement, lamenting “I am alone in an open-atrium whorehouse, overweight, out of place.” Similarly, though Hall recognizes and is amazed by the power of same-sex intimacy, he struggles to find this serendipity in his personal life. However, rather than redacting this experience, Hall leans into the fact that nothing is one-sided and acknowledges that even the most clarifying processes, events, and relationships can also be uncomfortable, awkward, and even painful. He authentically confesses how his struggles with self-acceptance transcend internal psychology and manifest in his own relationships. From describing the awkwardness of phone sex hotlines to the discomfort of penetrative sex to navigating relationships after rape, Hall explores a variety of intense, uncomfortable situations without sacrificing detail to accommodate palatability.
Though Hall’s identity as a gay man remains central to many of the essays in the collection, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well also explores topics other than (but perhaps no less fraught than) sexuality. The essay “Suicide Memorabilia” maps a family history of mental illness and suicide, frequently returning to Hall’s memories of his mother’s suicidal tendencies and frequent mental breaks. Pulling from memories starting as early as childhood, Hall recounts various catalysts that prompted his mother to threaten herself or others in the family including a family fight that “exceeded decorum as much as it did the midnight hour,” the crumbling economic situation of the family business, or perhaps most perplexing, an apparent nothing. Like the rest of the collection, this essay is founded upon duality, this time between the desensitization to recurring realities and the shock that never quite dims when confronted with situations of this nature. Describing this confusion, Hall writes, “when you see your mother with a gun, you think it’s you.”
Surfacing also is Hall’s contention with how he perceives his mother and, in turn, how he perceives himself: “my mother belongs to the world of reckless romance novels, the world of cheeky and glamorous women whose lives were constantly redefined by the epiphany desire brings. These heroines wielded power that would know no bounds. I too wanted to be that necessary.” Hall’s entanglement with family suicide, however, does not start nor end with his mother but rather haunts previous generations, which Hall addresses with a biting straightforwardness. Detailing another of his mother’s suicidal episodes, Hall says “After the gun is taken away, my mother has no control…My mother will not get rid of the gun. It has sentimental meaning. An heirloom, even if it isn’t exactly the gun my grandmother used to kill herself.” Hall’s reluctance to indulge excess sentimentality collides with language that describes suicide almost as if it is an asset to be passed down, once again reshaping and challenging the way in which the topic is perceived by the reader.
I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well pushes the boundaries of the ways in which already complicated topics are frequently discussed, but that isn’t to say they are treated without care. Despite the inherent weight of the topics explored in this work, Hall navigates the collection with a nimble sense of humor and delights in the absurdity of the moments contained within the piece, allowing them to breathe and acknowledging their absurdity rather than pushing them to conform to expected narratives or trying to create more sentiment in a moment than what arises organically. This same process is echoed in the use of the lyric essay which flows and affords space to explore topics—such as queerness—that so often evade and resist the constriction of overly wrought forms. Within the nine essays of the collection, Hall also digs at a larger sentiment that plagues much of the queer community: the struggle to, at once, maintain visibility and invisibility. He strategically employs this struggle in a general and extremely personal sense that lulls the reader into a realm of shared existence and crafts from this a narrative that deftly approaches fraught subject matter with particular tones and astute attention to detail that does not waver.
Lauren Walters is an English and creative writing major at Lebanon Valley College. Beyond her studies, she also serves as the prose editor for Green Blotter, works as a writing tutor, and creates social media content for various organizations across campus. When she’s not reading and writing for class, you’ll likely find her reading and writing for fun, talking to herself, or having opinions about things at @l_ann18 on Twitter.