Big Summer

arts · EN

“Everything is symbolic.” In the spring of 1989, eighteen-year-old Allan Wiedenfeld began keeping a journal. He wrote about nearly everything: friendship and jealousy, sex and death, family and religion, books and bad decisions, McDonald’s and laundromats, Wisconsin and the places beyond it he imagined might contain another kind of life. Over the next five months, the entries become the record of a life quietly changing shape. High school ends. His family grows more unstable. His younger brother gets into increasingly serious trouble. A trip to New York becomes a secret. Friendships intensify into something harder to define. And a relationship with another boy begins to force questions Allan can describe on the page long before he knows what to do with them. Big Summer is a serialized memoir drawn from that journal, preserving the intelligence, absurdity, anxiety and startling intimacy of the original voice.