Intimacy Idiot

Isaac Oliver

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781476746685
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

From an award-winning playwright “who splits the difference between David Rakoff and Larry David” (New York magazine)—a “compulsively readable debut” (Time Out New York) of big-hearted, laugh-until-you-can’t-breathe essays, stories, and riffs on finding love and intimacy in New York City.

Since moving to New York a decade ago, award-winning writer and performer Isaac Oliver has pined for countless strangers on the subway, slept with half the people in his Washington Heights neighborhood, and observed the best and worst of humanity from behind the glass of a Times Square theater box office. Whether he’s hooking up with a man who dresses as a dolphin, suffering on airplanes and buses next to people with Food From Home, or hovering around an impenetrable circle of attractive people at a cocktail party, Oliver captures the messy, moving, and absurd moments of urban life as we live it today. In this uproariously funny debut collection, he serves up a comedic cornucopia of sketches, vignettes, lists, and diaries from his life as a young, fanciful, and extremely single gay man in New York City.

“Oliver has mastered the art of self-deprecation...he can find humor and heart in the unlikeliest of places,” raves Entertainment Weekly. Culled from years of heartbreak, hook-ups, and more awkwardness than a virgin at prom and a whore in church (and he should know because he’s been both), Intimacy Idiot chronicles Oliver’s encounters with love, infatuation, resilience, and self-acceptance that echo our universal desire for intimacy of all kinds.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Online Dating Profile
• How I Didn’t Learn to Drive
• Subway Diary
• The Dolphin from Dubai
• Cooking for One
• People’s Parties
• Love Poem for the Guy across from Me on the Subway This Morning
• Poser
• Subway Diary
• My Kind of Bar
• Zoo Stories
• Coming Up
• A Few Key Erotic Moments from My Early Adolescence
• Subway Diary
• Love Poem for the Tall Drink of Water Who Shushed the Loud Gay Guys next to Me at a Concert
• Traveling Alone
• Cooking for One
• Dates
• Scene from a Box Office
• Subway Diary
• Triptych
• Some Scattered Thoughts on Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Marion, Massachusetts
• Subway Diary
• The Horny New York Poem
• The White Russian
• Scene from a Box Office
• Home Invasions
• Cooking for One
• Love in the Time of Eczema
• Subway Diary
• Ah Ah
• Love Poem for the Fair-Haired Young Man Doing the New York Times Crossword Puzzle
• Where I Live
• Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage
• Things I Know to Be True
• A Curse
• The Law Student
• Love Poem for the Preppy Guy with the Single Cupcake
• Cooking for One
• Casual Sex Correspondence
• How to Build a Fire (in Thirty Easy Steps)
• The Hockey Player
• The Lonely Christmas Poem
• Try It
• Box Office Hall of Shame
• Ails
• Obit for a Murse
• Subway Diary
• Over the Knee
• Texts from My Parents on Their Cruise
• Attend This Tale of Icy Gays
• Cooking for One
• Big Ben
• Scene from a Box Office
• Love Poem for the Hot Young Dad Holding the Newborn on the Subway
• Judged
• Subway Diary
• The Dark Place
• Where Is Your Shakespeare?
• Love Poem for the Classiest Gay Guy on Avenue A
• The Rural Northwestern Ohio Tragedy Tour
• The Woodsman
• Love Poem for the Couple in the Honeymoon Stage across from Me on the Subway
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright