The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994

by Thomas Mallon

Overview

From the renowned novelist and critic, an exquisite collection of journal entries from the 1980s and ’90s, tracking a young, gay author’s literary coming-of-age in New York during the AIDS crisis

In 1983, Thomas Mallon was still unknown. A literature professor at Vassar College, he spent his days traveling from Manhattan to campus, reviewing books to make ends meet and searching the city for his own purpose and fulfillment. The AIDS epidemic was beginning to surge in New York City, the ever-bustling epicenter of literary culture and gay life, alive with parties, art, and sex.

Though he didn’t know it, everything would soon change for Mallon. Riding the success of his debut, A Book of One’s Own, he became a fixture within the city’s literary scene, crossing paths with cultural giants and becoming an editor at GQ. He captured it all in his daily journals. But in some ways it was the worst possible time for a gay coming-of-age in the city. One of his lovers succumbed to AIDS, and the illness of others was both a heartbreaking reality and a constant reminder of his own exposure.

Tracing his own life day by day, Mallon evokes all that those years encompassed: the hookups, intensifying politics, personal tragedies, as well as his own blossoming success and eventual romantic happiness. The Very Heart of It is a brilliant and bewitching look into the daily life of one of our most important literary figures, and a keepsake from a bygone era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593801802
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Pages:	592
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

THOMAS MALLON is the author of eleven novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, Landfall, and Up With the Sun. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. In 2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Editorial Reviews

"Illuminating, heartbreaking, hilarious, romantic, terrifying, thrilling, baffling, joyous—such is life! And such are the diaries of our great writer Thomas Mallon, who has preserved in The Very Heart of It one precious moment in time told in his inestimable style. I found myself reading addictively. A world opens up in these pages. What a book!" —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less and Less Is Lost

"While reading The Very Heart of It, I tried to discipline myself, but suddenly it was 4 AM. Thomas Mallon’s diaries, focusing on the 1980s through the early 90s, depict that era with heartbreaking accuracy, from the dread of an AIDS test to the glory of living, on cobbled-together funds, in the social and cultural capitol of New York City. His portraits of the rancorous literary scene, political ferment and his hectic love life are witty, original and sinfully entertaining (it’s a rare work that travels from Robert Mapplethorpe to Dan Quayle). Upon reaching the final page all I wanted was more." —Paul Rudnick, author of What is Wrong with You?

"Thomas Mallon’s The Very Heart of It is a big-hearted account of his life from 1983 to 1994, as he was becoming the distinguished American man of letters and man-about-town that he manifestly is now. It’s also a modern-day, Defoe-esque diary of the plague years, when AIDS swept through the country, scything its grim swath through the artist community. It’s fittingly ironic that Mallon, arguably our best living historical novelist, made his first splash with a non-fictional book about famous diarists. With this book, he joins those ranks." —Christopher Buckley, author of Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir

“‘We’ve all been exposed, we’re all living under the sword.’ Among many forlorn entries, this sentence is one that perhaps best encapsulates The Very Heart of It, Thomas Mallon’s moving epistolary memoir chronicling a coming-of-age during the AIDS crisis. . . . The journals, with both candor and levity, reveal a city at once inhibited by Reagan-era conservatism and emboldened by passionate social justice. Mallon’s diaries are a powerful and palpable historical record, sure to remind many of the injustices faced by so many LGBTQ folk only a few decades ago.” —Nathan Smith, The Observer

“Merging a young gay man’s keenly observed coming of age, a lively tour of a bygone literary New York, and a devastating portrait of the city during the height of the AIDS crisis, the diaries capture the creative energy and lasting sorrow of a remarkable era.” —The New Yorker

“[Mallon’s] diaries capture the atmosphere of a city and community reeling from the AIDS crisis amid the material optimism of Reagan-era America. His writing stands out for its honesty and authenticity, offering a vivid, personal chronicle of a transformative era.” —Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times

“Throughout a career spanning seven works of nonfiction and 11 novels . . . Mallon has managed to capture the all of it: the tragic and mundane, the petty and comically absurd lurking in even the weightiest moments of the past. Turns out that all along in his diaries, Mallon was simultaneously doing the same for his own life and times. . . . In addition to being a real-time threnody to AIDS and its victims, as well as a love letter to a New York where the Runyonesque waitress in the local coffee shop will call him "Cookie" and a walk can include sightings of Greta Garbo and Jackie Kennedy, The Very Heart of It is also a portrait of an artist trying to break free of his day job. . . . Mallon is well aware he's one of the lucky ones and his life's great luck is also ours, his readers.” —Maureen Corrigan, on NPR's "Fresh Air"

“[Mallon’s] diaries capture the youthful mood of a certain period in New York City. . . . He’s new in Manhattan, a gay man bending toward neoconservatism, relatively virginal and unsure in this pre-dating-app era how to meet anyone except in sketchy bars. This is early in the AIDS crisis, and confusion and terror are omnipresent. . . . The Very Heart of It functions as a Woody Allen-like ode to New York City. Mallon feels lucky, nearly every day, to be here, what with the Frick, the Carlyle and ‘the Chrysler Building twinkling across the street like the world’s ultimate Christmas tree.’” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

“What makes the book sing is the voice: smart, attuned to the specific, delightfully and relentlessly snide. . . . A kind of sketchbook of . . . literary life in New York City during the AIDS crisis, and Condé Nast in its last golden age. Mallon is a keen observer of not just himself but of his contemporaries, stray encounters on the street or in late-night bars, and the political scene.” —Thomas Beller, Air Mail

“What's great about this book is it tells you so much about gay life in the 80s and 90s in New York, the heartbreak of AIDS, but also . . . there's a fun amount of literary gossip in here, and it's just as hilarious as it is heartbreaking.” —Bill Goldstein on “Weekend Today in New York”

“In novels including Henry and Clara and Fellow Travelers, Thomas Mallon has used American history to help tell unforgettable stories of characters whose lives feel real as they play out against true events. Here, the award-winning writer ditches the fiction without losing his knack for depicting times and places; his own diaries from a young-adult life in New York City in the 1980s and ’90s reveal a coming of age in a dangerous, exciting, and unprecedented era and share how one of American literature’s great writers tells his own tale.” —Town and Country

“Moving [and] bittersweet. . . . The many human moments (funny, sad, witty, horrible, and beautiful) populating Mallon’s diaries collectively (and vicariously) illuminate a supremely resilient community that soldiered on (and kept dancing) despite insurmountable loss and pain. An exquisitely evocative glimpse into an unparalleled era in queer history steeped in joy, sex, and death.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Compulsively browsable. . . . Mallon’s diaries paint an arresting panorama of Reagan-era New York City, full of droll character studies. . . . [Mallon’s] prose conveys deep emotion with clear-eyed, matter-of-fact detail. It amounts to an engrossing evocation of an artist and a city in transition.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

★ 2025-04-19
A celebrated historical novelist shares his diary entries.

Culled from copious handwritten notebooks, Mallon’s moving, bittersweet epistolary memoir begins in the fall of 1983, when the author was 32 and an English professor at Vassar College. Writing novels seemed a more exciting career transition, however, so the author relocated to New York City. But as his missives incrementally chronicle, these were also the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when the queer community slowly became decimated by an invisible threat no one saw coming. Dreadfully aware of his own viral vulnerability, Mallon confesses, “We’ve all been exposed, we’re all living under the sword, & I’m no more lethal than anyone else. We’re either going to get it or not.” As his journal entries become less optimistic, Mallon observes regulars disappearing from the Saturday night gay Catholic Masses he attends, along with men in their 20s and 30s stricken with facial Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. As his professional writing career flourished, the decimation continued. To salvage some semblance of normalcy and happiness, he sought out the kind of “extravagant love” found in more awkward, reserved men, while carefully entertaining casual sexual affairs in such a way as to “put me (probably) in no physical danger, just more psychological peril.” Despite Mallon’s conversational prose, the anxiety over how inevitable getting sick felt is palpable throughout these entries (“my AIDS fears travel everywhere with me”), but all are leavened with pauses of levity as when he writes rapturously about Manhattan life (and its rats), his brilliantly observed social foibles, or his humorous exasperation when overthinking a cough until the ’90s offered relief. This time capsule profiles the queer community’s immense struggle to survive against the nearly insurmountable odds of AIDS and weaponized politics, while concurrently fighting for social justice and equal rights. The many human moments (funny, sad, witty, horrible, and beautiful) populating Mallon’s diaries collectively (and vicariously) illuminate a supremely resilient community that soldiered on (and kept dancing) despite insurmountable loss and pain.

An exquisitely evocative glimpse into an unparalleled era in queer history steeped in joy, sex, and death.

Kirkus Reviews