So, you know how people talk about a golden age of short story writing that took place during the 1980s? I often fantasize about that era, and try to find the writers who were part of it. This book was written in 1990, but Leavitt's first collection came out in 1984, and I wonder if he's part of the whole 1980s short story phenomenon. One of these stories made me cry, another gave me chills. If you're wondering what kind of stories these are, they're hard realism (my favorite), contemporary subjects, and most, if not all, have a gay character or a few. The title, which is also the title of the first story, is partly a reference to the college drinking game "I've never," where people go around saying things they've never done (as I'm writing it here, it sounds like it could only be trite, but Leavitt manages to bring up the idea of the game again in the last sentence in a way that's both breathtaking and very sad). Another thing about this collection that I deeply admired is that Leavitt is gay and writes about characters who are gay, but the stories don't reek of identity politics the way a lot of stuff that was written in the 90s does. Nothing preachy or ideologically assertive here -- at the height of AIDS, Leavitt stood tall and wrote real literature about homosexual characters during a time when many writers merely made a slide from lampooning gay characters to treating them as one-sided tragic elements. Maybe I'm putting too much emphasis on this -- the point is, anyone can enjoy this book. Particularly impressive to me was Leavitt's rendering of the difficulties of friendship.
