I bought my copy of Tin Man this summer — in New York, on the same trip when we went to see Cole Escola in their final week of Oh Mary! The show was pure queer delirium: a tornado of camp brilliance, Timing so sharp it could have shaved the walls, and laughter that left my face aching in that rare, euphoric way only queer theater can produce. It was a night of joy, that full-body kind that makes you forget about gravity for a while. If you didn’t catch it, it’s worth a read.
Self-Sabotage - Jeffrey Self
I didn’t even pick up Self-Sabotage on purpose. It landed in my lap through Eric Cervini’s Very Gay Book Club, which I’d joined on a whim. The club promised monthly selections from across queer history and culture. When I signed up, I made a vow: I would read…
The next morning, I wandered into the Upper East Side location of the Strand. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular — maybe a staff pick, maybe a paperback for the trip back. On a display table near the front, I saw a small handwritten card taped beneath a slim book with a bright, unassuming cover. The note read, more or less:
“Skip A Little Life. Read this instead.”
Bookstore shade is usually subtle. This was not. And because it was about A Little Life, it stopped me cold. You don’t publicly position a 210-page novel against a thousand-page monolith of queer literary suffering unless you’re trying to say something. The bluntness caught my attention, but what really lingered was the promise underneath it:
maybe there was a queer story out there unafraid to be tender without being annihilating.
So I picked up Tin Man, slipped it into my bag, and carried it back home. I didn’t read it right away. I waited until a quiet Sunday morning, when I could give it the kind of attention the booksellers had practically demanded.
And they were right.
Not because Tin Man is better than A Little Life, but because it is attempting something entirely different — something smaller, gentler, and, in many ways, truer.
The Softness of Boyhood
Early in Tin Man, Ellis’s mother brings home a framed print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. She’s won it in a raffle at work. Her choice is between the painting and a microwave, and she doesn’t hesitate: she picks the painting. The detail is small, almost throwaway, but it tells you something crucial — she believes beauty belongs in a home, even if practicality might argue otherwise.
That decision shapes Ellis more than he realizes. The sunflowers become part of the emotional landscape of his boyhood: an opening, a hint of possibility, an invitation into color for a kid who isn’t used to seeing the world arranged that way.
It’s not a symbol that carries the weight of the novel. It’s simply accurate. And, in its accuracy, tender.
Ellis meets Michael when they are boys — adolescents stumbling into themselves with an instinctive mutual recognition queer kids often share long before they know what queerness is. Their friendship is immediate, intense, and intimate in the specific way boyhood friendships can be before the world teaches boys to shut the doors behind their feelings.
Reading their early chapters, I kept thinking of a friend from college — the one I wrote about in my essay, Billy and the Kid. Ours was a friendship, full and complete. Whatever feelings I carried were mine alone, unspoken then and never reciprocated. But the closeness — the sense of seeing and being seen without having the language to name it — that part echoed. That part resonated in the marrow.
There’s something about those years, when connection feels almost electric but you don’t yet know what to do with that current. Ellis and Michael move around each other with that same unarticulated tenderness. They are not lovers. They are not even certain what they are. But they are something.
And sometimes “something” is the thing that shapes you the most deeply.
The Bend Toward Adulthood
The truth about growing up — especially if you’re queer and closeted — is that the life you want and the life you choose aren’t always the same thing.
Ellis grows up and marries Annie. Their marriage is kind, steady, and comfortable, the kind of relationship that looks perfectly respectable from the outside. Yet there’s an emotional muting to his adulthood, a sense that something vital was carefully folded away and stored out of sight. He loves Annie; that isn’t the question. But there is a hollowness beneath the tenderness, as if he’s living the life he was supposed to choose rather than the one that ever chose him.
Michael drifts into a different orbit — Oxford, then London, then relationships that flicker and fade. His life is looser, more porous, sometimes joyful, sometimes lonely. There’s sex and casual intimacy, but also a kind of hunger. You have the sense, reading him, that he’s searching for something he tasted only once, in those early years with Ellis.
Winman doesn’t make this dynamic tragic. She makes it human.
And that’s where Tin Man hits its deepest nerve. Not in the heartbreak itself, but in the ordinariness of the aching.
I felt that in my own bones. I spent decades building the life I believed I was meant to live — the marriage, the children, the job, the orderly choreography of heterosexual adulthood. It was a life that looked right. It was a life that worked. It was a life I loved in many ways. But it wasn’t built on the truth I eventually learned to claim.
Ellis’s adulthood is familiar because it mirrors the emotional economy so many men are taught to navigate: choose safety over longing, stability over honesty, quiet satisfaction over open vulnerability. And for a long time, those choices work.
Until they don’t.
Until the unlived life starts to whisper.
Michael’s Part — Grief That Moves Like Weather
Michael’s section of the novel is structurally different — a shift in voice, in rhythm, in emotional weather. It’s quieter, more fragile, like listening to someone speak from slightly behind a closed door.
His loneliness is real but never theatrical. The AIDS crisis enters the story not as melodrama or spectacle but as atmosphere — an undertone of fear, loss, and the relentless responsibility of surviving.
Winman handles queer grief with a kind of restraint that aches. There are no sweeping death sentences. No grand monologues. Just the slow eroding of a life shaped by love that was never fully allowed to reach daylight.
Michael’s memories of Ellis — the boyhood, the closeness, the almost-but-not-quite — become the axis around which his adult life turns. Not obsessively. Just quietly. The way a compass needle always finds north even when you aren’t looking.
This kind of devotion doesn’t require romance. It doesn’t require reciprocation. It doesn’t even require articulation.
It simply is.
And that felt familiar too — not in the specifics, but in the emotional shape. The recognition of someone who mattered deeply, profoundly, in a way that didn’t need a label at the time and doesn’t need one now. Someone whose impact didn’t fade just because the connection stayed safely within the limits of friendship.
Tin Man vs. A Little Life: The Difference Between Ache and Ordeal
Now we get to the comparison the Strand bookseller made so boldly.
A Little Life is enormous — thousands of emotional tons, a cathedral of suffering built with meticulous, almost obsessive detail. It is a story where pain is not just present but structural, where trauma becomes a kind of gravitational force. Some people find it cathartic. Some find it punishing. Almost no one reads it casually.
Tin Man is the opposite in scale and philosophy.
Its heartbreak is quiet, tenable, the kind of ache real people survive every day. It doesn’t try to overwhelm you. It doesn’t treat suffering as destiny. It doesn’t mistake devastation for depth.
Where A Little Life feels operatic, Tin Man feels lived.
Where one asks you to endure, the other asks you to remember.
Where one builds a monument to pain, the other traces the small fractures that make a life tender and recognizable.
Both books matter. Both have a place. But Winman is doing something different — something smaller in scope, but in many ways more radical: she portrays queer lives without spectacle.
Pain is present, yes. But it’s the kind you can hold in your hands without burning yourself.
And for many of us, that’s the more honest story.
Art as Memory, Not Moral
The sunflowers in Tin Man aren’t a heavy metaphor. They’re simply a detail — a correct one — and one that threads quietly through Ellis’s life. They don’t transform him. They don’t illuminate some grand theme. They simply accompany him, the way a familiar song or a photograph or a certain smell can accompany anyone across decades.
That’s what art does.
It doesn’t save us.
It shadows us.
Writing does that too.
When I wrote Billy and the Kid, I wasn’t rewriting history or confessing something long hidden. I was naming something that had lived quietly in me for years — the significance of a friendship I didn’t fully understand at the time. I wasn’t constructing a romance; I was honoring a memory.
That’s why Tin Man resonated so deeply. It treats memory as an active force, not a sentimental one. It allows love to matter even when it never crossed the threshold of articulation.
It lets tenderness live without requiring permission.
The Life That Wasn’t Lived
The final chapters of Tin Man are devastating in their simplicity. Ellis and Michael’s story doesn’t resolve. It doesn’t need to. The power of their relationship was never in the conclusion; it was in the fact that it shaped them even when unspoken.
Not every love story needs to be lived to be true.
Not every true thing needs an ending to matter.
The unlived life has weight.
The unspoken feeling has presence.
The connection left incomplete can still define the trajectory of a person’s heart.
And maybe that’s why the Strand bookseller recommended Tin Man over A Little Life. Not because one is better, but because one understands that the quieter sorrows — the ones we don’t name, the ones we fold into memory rather than plot — can be just as formative as the spectacular ones.
What the Book Left Me With
When I set Tin Man down a few days ago, I didn’t feel shattered. I felt seen. I felt understood in a way I hadn’t expected from such a small novel.
Here’s what stayed with me:
That boyhood tenderness is real, even when it remains undefined.
That adulthood can close doors we didn’t realize we’d opened.
That grief can move like weather — sometimes heavy, sometimes barely felt — without ever leaving the landscape.
That memory can be a form of devotion.
That some relationships matter even when they live entirely within the realm of friendship.
That not every queer story needs to be a tragedy to be profound.
Mostly, though, the book reminded me that the unlived life doesn’t disappear.
It stays.
It shapes us.
It waits for us to acknowledge it.
And if we’re lucky — we finally do.
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