Why am I passionate about this?
I’m a 54-year-old gay man who has led my own messy life here in New York City, marked as much by sex, romance, friendship, and culture as by drug addiction, relationship drama, mental illness and youthful trauma. I’ve published five novels, all of which contain queer characters who’ve not exactly been poster children for mainstream-world-approved LGBTQ behavior. I’m drawn to novels like the ones I’ve mentioned because they show queer people not as the hetero world often would like them to be—sanitized, asexual, witty and “fabulous”—but as capable of dysfunction, mediocrity, unwise choices and poor conduct as anybody else.
Tim's book list on LGBTQ+ characters who are a total mess
Why did Tim love this book?
This remarkable novel, patterned lightly after James Joyce’s Ulysses, is the tale of Carlotta Mercedes, a Black and Hispanic transgender woman who returns to her Brooklyn neighborhood after serving decades in prison because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Unfolding almost in real time over the 2015 July 4 weekend, the book has a chaotic, madcap energy and toggles seamlessly throughout between a traditional third-person narrative and the hilarious, heartbreaking first-person monologue inside Carlotta’s brilliant, bonkers head.
Reading this novel is like getting on a nonstop rollercoaster with a narrator who will crack you up and make you root for her right up to the ecstatic final page.
5 authors picked Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In this “dangerously hilarious” novel (Los Angeles Times), a trans woman reenters life on the outside after more than twenty years in a men’s prison, over one consequential Fourth of July weekend—from the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Delicious Foods.
Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she’d grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected,…
- Coming soon!