It’s a vivid tale, though not always an easy one. Oseland is just old enough to have felt the sexual unshackling that presaged the AIDS decades, and has lived to tell us his truth, which is anything but neurotic.
Former Saveur editor-in-chief and Top Chef Masters judge James Oseland writes this vibrant coming-of-age memoir in an instantly lovable voice, part surly teenager and part sweetly naive dreamer ... Oseland tells this story with a poignant style all his own.
Affecting, if uneven ... [Oseland] doesn’t impose [his] knowledge on his younger self. The effect is like a compression of narrative vision, a collapsing of the distance between then and nowThe issue is that, for all the value of proximity, Jimmy Neurosis lacks a certain contemplative voice — the sense of reflection on which a memoir relies. It’s not a deal-breaker because much of what Oseland reveals is moving, but the book could have benefited from a little more.
As 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.
Sometimes grim, sometimes exuberant ... juxtaposes suburban banality with grungy punk clubs, Quaaludes and heroin, and furtive men’s-room hookups, in a stew of atmospheric prose ... Oseland’s adolescent sulks sometimes grate, but at his best he presents an engrossing portrait of his emergence from childhood constraints into a frightening, exhilarating adult world.
