Our History in New York by Linsey Abrams (All Editions)

Our History in New York by Linsey Abrams follows a single year in the lives of narrator Chloe, her long-time lover Helen, and their mostly lesbian and gay friends. The novel moves through pregnancy by insemination, a political campaign, AIDS, romance, and aging — the full texture of a community navigating life at the end of the twentieth century. New York itself is a constant presence, and each chapter functions as a discrete piece, what Sojourner called an exquisite short story. It is a meditation on time, art, mortality, and what it means to remember who you are.

Genre: Fiction

Subjects: Fiction / Gay; Fiction / Lesbian

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Comments

Our History in New York is Linsey Abrams’ second novel, and it is a more ambitious book than her first. Where Charting by the Stars traced an individual consciousness, this novel widens the lens to a community — specifically the lesbian and gay community of Greenwich Village in the mid-1990s, living in the long shadow of the AIDS crisis. The novel’s structure, built from interlocking chapters that each stand alone, gives it an episodic quality that suits its subject: a community is not a single story but many, held together by shared place and shared history.

The mid-1990s setting is worth noting. By the time the novel appeared in 1995, AIDS had been reshaping queer community life for over a decade, and fiction was beginning to reckon seriously with what that meant for those who survived and continued living. Abrams approaches this not with the urgency of crisis writing but with the quieter register of aftermath — people building lives, making families, running for office, growing older. It is a less visible strand of queer literary history than the more celebrated AIDS novels of the period, but a necessary one.

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