My Pinup

A short two-part memoir in which Hilton Als writes about Prince and about his own longing, and about the ways love, loss, race and desire cross.

The book was published by New Directions in November 2022. Als writes toward Prince directly, addressing him in the second person, and sets his admiration beside the downtown queer nightclub scene of his youth, the AIDS crisis, Dorothy Parker and an ill-fated peach pie. The material is personal and compressed, and moves between celebrity and private life.

Als is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and theater critic at The New Yorker, and was earlier a staff writer at The Village Voice. His books include The Women (1996), which turns on his mother, Dorothy Dean and Owen Dodson, and White Girls (2013), essays on race, gender and identity. My Pinup runs to 48 pages.