I Wished

“I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can’t handle.”

For most of his life, Dennis Cooper believed the person he had loved the most and would always love above all others was George Miles. In his first novel in ten years, Dennis Cooper writes about George Miles, love, loss, addiction, suicide, and how fiction can capture these things, and how it fails to capture them. Candid and powerful, I Wished is a radical work of shifting forms. It includes appearances by Santa Claus, land artist James Turrell, sentient prairie dogs, John Wayne Gacy, Nick Drake, and George, the muse for Cooper’s acclaimed novels Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period, collectively known as “The George Miles Cycle.” In revisiting the inspiration for the Cycle, Dennis has written a masterwork: the most raw, personal, and haunted book of his career.Praise for I Wished

The Guardian Best Books of 2021
A Bookforum Best Book of 2021
A Vogue Best Book of Fall
One of Lithub's "22 Novels You Need to Read this Fall"

“Intricate, funny, destabilizing and totally unforeseen.”
—Rachel Kushner

“May just be his most surreal, disturbing, vulnerable work yet (which is saying a lot).”
—Vogue

“Whatever Cooper represents in the landscape of contemporary literature, he’s without a doubt one of the most vital and important writers to emerge in the past 50 years, and his genius goes far beyond mere taboo-breaking (although it’s very difficult to read one of his deadpan, hardcore novels and not walk away a few degrees less innocent than you were on page one). Cooper’s books are dissection tables of desire; they take a bone saw to the dreams, sexual fantasies, obsessions, youthful delusions, and myths of fame and individuality that have come to define our private and public selves.”
—Interview Magazine

“The George Miles Cycle novels feature a mosaic of broken characters engaging in drug abuse, adolescent sex, and violent exploitation. Fearlessly honest and unconventional, the series is considered a landmark of experimental fiction and has accrued both acclaim and moralistic scorn. Though technically not a new installment, I Wished excavates the cycle’s source material while paying tribute to its subversive ethos.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“I Wished is not an easy book by any means, but is in some way a balm to those who also carry the weight of loss, the acknowledgement of how heavy it can be, and how it is also proof of having lived and loved. It is a book about what to do with that weight, how to carry it, how to honor it.”
—Lithub

“His most explicit elegy . . . One of the epic love stories of 20th-century letters.”
—The Nation

“[I Wished] reads like a kaleidoscopic fever dream . . . Throughout its splintered storylines, Cooper touches on the concept of the unknowable, mourning, and the innate failure of language.”
—them.

“There are few writers like Dennis Cooper.”
—AnOther Magazine

“I Wished is a marvel of both economy and excess, a haunted theme park built on the fairgrounds of its author’s throbbing heart.”
—Justin Taylor, Bookforum

“A literary homage to his friend and lover, Cooper fans and followers will revel in the depth, despair, and cathartic release this elegiac book strives for and unforgettably achieves in spades.”
—The Bay Area Reporter

“Revisits the story of the great love of Cooper’s life . . . I Wished distinguishes itself for its vulnerability and reflection.”
—Alta

“A deep, troubling, yet ultimately beautiful meditation on loss, art, love, and motivation.”
—Southwest Review

“To reduce I Wished to a memoir about loss, trauma, and grief would be an unforgivable crime against literature. While the inspiration for the book comes from a place of loss and trauma, it is an astonishing work of art that poses the unsettling but necessary question of whether it is truly possible to write about loss and do it justice.”
—queerguru

“A poignant and haunting elegy to a figure that has loomed large in Cooper's imagination since dying by suicide at age 30. The phantasmagorical qualities make every page a thrilling revelation, even for readers unfamiliar with the George Miles cycle of books. It is a beautiful, maddening riddle about love and what is set adrift in its wake . . . A disquieting and magnetic feat of fiction.”
—Shelf Awareness

“Surreal and elegiac.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“An elegy for a friend, lover, and muse that resists conventions of storytelling and expands the possibilities of the novel form with daring and vulnerability . . .  Cooper’s urgency to relate his friend’s story is felt in every word, image, and narrative move; even the most oddball structural decisions possess tremendous power.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

Praise for Dennis Cooper

“[A] brilliant, triumphantly lurid writer as well as a supremely talented, elegant stylist whose prose is smart and nervy. He might also be the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction.”
—Bret Easton Ellis

“In another country or another era, Dennis Cooper’s books would be circulated in secret, explosive samizdat editions that friends and fans would pass around and savor like forbidden absinthe . . . This is high-risk literature.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“His work belongs with the likes of Poe, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, and Georges Bataille, other writers who argued with mortality.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Cooper is a profoundly original American visionary, and the most important transgressive literary artist since Burroughs . . . An American master.”
—Salon

“Cooper’s synaesthetic subliminal metaphors should be outlawed, so quickly and lethally do they sink into your subconscious.”
—BookForumDennis Cooper is the author of the George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels: Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His other works include My Loose Thread; The Sluts, winner of France’s Prix Sade and the Lambda Literary Award; God Jr.; Wrong; The Dream Police; Ugly Man; and The Marbled Swarm. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Paris. He is the director (with Zac Farley) of Permanent Green Light and Like Cattle Towards Glow.Overture
 
 
I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can’t handle.
     There’s no one I can talk to, basically. Every friend I used to have who also knew him hasn’t sought me out in years, which would be easy since I’m very mildly famous, whereas their last names are so commonplace that, when I search the web for them, literally thousands of candidates show up.
     I’ve talked about my friend in so many articles and interviews. If you do a search using his name, pages and pages will turn up, and every one that’s not about some far-flung namesake is either by me or about me, or it’s something made by someone who only knows the characters I’ve named for him.
     How could someone like him die without a single friend or member of his family ever putting up a tribute page or even mentioning his name in tweets or Facebook posts, even on his birthday or on his death day’s anniversary or even randomly in reference to something in their lives or art that brought his memory to mind.
     Why hasn’t anyone who knew him ever tried to contact me to say, “I knew him too,” or “Thank you for devoting so much writing to him,” or “How could you have written such disturbing things about my friend or brother or former boyfriend or son or cousin?” Is what I’ve done that obscure? I guess.
     When George doesn’t cross my mind, which can happen for a while, weeks, months, I’m okay, but then I think of him and get like this. But not “like this” because I almost never talk about him, period. I’ll say a little, and people will say, “That’s interesting and sad.” But they mean for me and not for him.
     Or I write about him, and my readers say, “That’s sick or awesome, or he’s so cute, or he’s too unsympathetic, or he’s very touching, or he’s boring, or he’s really sexy, or I knew someone like him too, or I relate to him so much,” which is the best or only meaningful response that I can even hope for. That’s as good as it will ever get for him.
     I saw a therapist for three years, and I talked about him there, but she said he was a symbol in my lifelong playing out of shit my parents did to me, and she just wanted me to talk about my past, not him. I would ask her please, please forget about me and think of me as just some person who is telling you about him.
     I know how difficult he was to be around, and how emotionally hot and cold, and I understand he did and said some awful things to people near the end when I wasn’t with him unforgivably, but could his death really have been such a big relief to everyone? Like, I never need to think about that guy again?
     I had a friend who claims to be a psychic. She did a reading for me once and said she saw him hovering above my head or something. She said he’s always watching over me, feeling so much love and gratitude for something that I used to do for him or have been doing since he died, and I almost believed her, and maybe I even do. That’s how easy it is to hurt me.
     Even now I think, What if her envisioning was true, because I want so unbelievably and inexpressibly for him to know he meant and means so much to me that I have written and still keep writing all these elegies and things, even when I’m not communicating anything beyond my need to talk about him, but why?
     I guess because I want someone who knew my friend to read this book and find me. I want this book to be more public than my others so it will find people who don’t normally read novels or who don’t give a shit about some weird cult writer’s books because it seems like everyone who either knew him or used to know me doesn’t.
     I want to know that all my love for him is worth it or find someone who’ll convince me he was no one much, or who’ll say, “He never mentioned you,” or that he referenced me offhandedly enough that it’s clear I didn’t mean that much to him, and that’s the hope, and that’s the fear, and I know that’s only semi-interesting to read, but it’s very hard for me to even do this.