I have an appointment with the twenty-first century,Baldwin tells one interviewer, less than a decade before his death in 1987. I guess I feel like I’m part of that appointment, and in that way exposed, and in that way lovingly violated by this new evidence. I tried some of the same faux-romantic maneuvers to trick myself out of being here, in the perfect hush of 4 a.m. Los Angeles, ruminating on what Jimmy teaches me by never learning not to love with his whole broken heart. And what I learned, what the book is too deferential to divulge directly, though it shows, is that a man who seems like your soulmate could be your devil, while one who appears to be just a friend could hand you the world. A book you’re afraid to write, like a person you’re afraid to love, will never leave you alone. You’re better off giving in and allowing the story to unfold. All you have to do to survive it is renounce the devil, though you might not be strong enough to do that, and steal the time alone to compose and think and brood and recover. In this way the writer triangulates for a lifetime. Boggs’s book is a meticulous and impressive record of such patterns, a lover’s almanac, and a monument that, in resurrecting a version of Jimmy he kept hidden or glamoured using the other more palatable identity markers, makes his absence more haunting and final, more like justice for him than all our tributes. So much of his time here was spent negotiating between honor and humiliation, between asking for help and being the help, insomuch as a man of letters can do the domestic American Gothic work of cleaning up our messes while his own fester and smolder. {read}