Sasha Frere-Jones in conversation with Michael Miller

Shuttling between his first year of life (1967) and the year he wrote the book (2020), Earlier is a sequence of moments, a record of the experiences that set the shape of a life, a book about how lives happen and sensibilities form. Bolex summers, Hot 97 and in love, Bad Brains ROIR tapes, being in a band with Spike Lee’s younger brother, Ouija boards and semiotics, propofol and benzodiazepines. New York daze.

Begun in 2010, Earlier was completed at the request of Deborah Holmes, to whom the book is dedicated. Holmes is the mother of Frere-Jones’s two boys, Sam and Jonah. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in July of 2020, Holmes died in January of 2021. Earlier is the last book she read.

“Earlier is a gorgeous, prismatic memoir,” writes Catherine Lacey. “It is an aching, inventive piece of memory work, lit by the universal light of grief. Its generosity and vulnerability are both contagious and humbling.” For Rachel Kushner, Earlier is “marbled with illuminated time capsules of the New York 1970s and 80s … an artful self-examination that floats, hovers, glows – and never wallows – on a pad of acute pain.” Says Lucy Sante, “Sasha Frere-Jones’s autobiography-in-snapshots, with its artfully scrambled chronology, is a portrait of the artist as a young slob, undergoing a whole-body education in life.”

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Copies of Earlier will be available for purchase and signing.

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MICHAEL MILLER is the editor in chief of Bookforum magazine.

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