Palladium, 1990 At the nightclub with my brothers Michael and Vinny, everything dissolves inside the eruption of sound and light. Whatever membrane that once held my place in the world now dematerializes in the collective rapture of the crowd.…
I find it very difficult to write about myself and avoid it whenever I can.
This is exactly what I did for many years while writing the larger memoir from which “Palladium” is drawn: five Brooklyn brothers raised in the eighties, three infected with HIV and two lost to AIDS. My family, crowded, Catholic, and in large part queer, had been blindsided by an epidemic at once excruciatingly personal and explosively political. It’s powerful stuff with which to find yourself touched—but I kind of left myself out of it. “Where are you?” people asked. I was a shadow. A bystander. Not even much of a narrator, or not one you could get to know (and maybe love). After all, the big stuff happened to somebody else. It was their story, not mine.
Obviously, that’s no way to go about writing a memoir, but I kept at it for years, because I felt I was supposed—maybe even obligated—to write it. I followed the manuscript wherever it took me, through a dozen different approaches, points of view and typefaces. (For a while, large portions of the story occurred in italics. Never do that!) But you can’t just put down words on paper. At some point the story, and the subject, must take shape, and that more than anything takes a sense of self.
“Palladium” was one of the first portions of the book where I compelled myself to center my experiences, and to sit in those moments that I thought I knew and remembered so well and let them reopen again with me as the subject. It’s not something I naturally do, at least not in my work, at least not so literally. Memories too are stubborn. What are we after with them? Comfort? Validation? The truth? It was by looking at the shape a memory took inside me that it became clear who was doing the asking. So now it’s my story, a funny, freaky survivor’s tale that showed me what it really means to write and how to once again call myself “brother.”
MATTHEW AQUILONE’s first novel, The Stager, will be published by Delphinium Books in November 2026. Other work of his has been seen in Bellingham Review, The Rumpus, Open Doors Review, Tendon, New York Daily News, The Nervous Breakdown, Christopher Street, Hyperallergic, South Dakota Review, Theater for the New City, the Ensemble Studio Theatre, and elsewhere. He’s been awarded fellowships and residencies at the Ucross Foundation, the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild and the I-Park Foundation. He was finalist for the Tin House Debut 40 Residency, longlisted for the DISQUIET Prize, and was a member of Brooklyn Writers Space. He is a graduate of Vassar College and the NYU MFA Program in Creative Writing. He lives in Brooklyn, where he was born and raised. Find him on Instagram @maquilone.
