PositiveLambda LiteraryAs a queer coming-of-age memoir, in particular, Jimmy Neurosis hits some predictable notes...But Jimmy Neurosis proves as excellent a queer memoir as it is predictable. With novelistic attention to plot and dialogue, Oseland writes with a liveliness born of both his empathy with and distance from his younger self ... Oseland’s memoir sketches the cultural, musical landscape for Edelman’s influential articulation of queerness as temporally stuck, if not retrograde. The fact that Oseland finds his way into a future may alienate him from the punk scene...he is no less queer, of course, for re-orienting himself toward this future. Oseland’s memoir insists that queers have always had a future and a community of their own making ... Jimmy Neurosis summarily serves as a valuable archive of the expressions of anti-social queerness that developed in the latter half of the twentieth century. But it is equally remarkable as a story of queer resilience – of finding that something better on the horizon and making your way toward it.
Rigoberto González
PositiveLambda LiteraryOver halfway through the book, Alex’s kidnapping can only return as a deft anti-climax. This is not a thriller. It’s a sentimental memoir about male vulnerability ... it eloquently memorializes the desire to be a man who has mutually supportive relationships with other men ... It’s a poignant study of Latino masculinity written with the poet’s sensitivity for all that can be contained in an image, a moment.
Alexander Chee
PositiveLambda Literary\"Chee’s advice for the writer spans the pragmatic and the lyrical ... I might have been a better fiction writer had I read Chee’s essays. I might have gained a more sophisticated understanding of how writing fiction emerges from the self yet, of necessity–and if it is to interest anyone beside yourself–take you outside yourself as well.\
