Crazy for Vincent

<b>Diary memoir poem fiction? Autopsy crime scene hagiography hymn? The chronicle of an obsessive love.</b><p>In the middle of the night between the 25th and 26th of November Vincent fell from the third floor playing parachute with a bathrobe. He drank a liter of tequila smoked Congolese grass snorted cocaine...<br>--from <i>Crazy for Vincent</i></p><p><i>Crazy for Vincent</i> begins with the death of the figure it fixates upon: Vincent a skateboarding drug-addled delicate monster of a boy in whom the narrator finds a most sublime beauty. By turns tender and violent Vincent drops in and out of French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert's life over the span of six years (from 1982 when he first met Vincent as a fifteen-year-old teenager to 1988). After Vincent's senseless death the narrator embarks on a reconnaissance writing mission to retrieve the Vincent that had entered elevated and emotionally eviscerated his life working chronologically backward from the death that opens the text. Assembling Vincent's fragmentary appearances in his journal the author seeks to understand what Vincent's presence in his life had been: a passion? a love? an erotic obsession? or an authorial invention? A parallel inquiry could be made into the book that results: Is it diary memoir poem fiction? Autopsy crime scene hagiography hymn? <i>Crazy for Vincent</i> is a text the very nature of which is as untethered as desire itself.</p>