A grand house lies reduced to ashes, and a young man sifts through the ruins looking for a caramel-colored suitcase and answers. Were Guy Trebay’s 2024 autobiography Do Something a work of fiction, it would be easier to critique this opening as too on the nose, too tightly tailored to the surrounding narrative—one absolutely littered with ashes both literal and not. The subtitle on the book’s jarring purple-and-yellow cover foreshadows the loom of destruction, a story about the “glitter and doom” that surrounded Trebay during his coming-of-age in 1970s New York. 

Trebay was born into money at a time in New York when ‘wealthy’ meant something different than ‘comfortable.’ However, it was not privilege of the ivy-plastered stone house, East Egg variety—even if it looked that way from the street; Trebay had no trust fund, private school education, or hand-me-down Land Rover like his peers. Riding off the miraculous success of Hawaiian Surf, a fad fragrance à la Drakkar Noir the brainchild of Trebay’s absent, dream-dizzy father, he says plainly that his family was merely “rich for a while.” Chartered planes, imported sports cars, trips to expensive equatorial resorts were all part of a “seemingly invincible glamour” which danced around his youth and defended his family’s vision of a future where these things would remain. But sooner rather than later, all these things faded away as he entered adolescence, setting out to forge an identity for himself. 

What I find most remarkable about the book is its dexterity, balancing with remarkable deft a personal narrative housing an exploration of—as a New York Times review of the book put it—Trebay’s “own fugitive needs,” a scattered but comprehensive family history, and an efficient overview of the grimy yet brilliant pre-AIDS Warholian cultural moment. Readers are ushered through scenes featuring characters like writer Jamaica Kincaid, fashion designer Charles James, drag queen and Lou Reed muse Candy Darling (“everybody’s darling” in Walk on the Wild Side), and many other Warhol superstars. His coverage as well of a vast cast of oddballs, crooks, performance artists, and everyone in between gives substance. It forms Trebay’s New York into a textured rendering of a place worthy of membership in the class of Mishima’s Kyoto or even Faulkner’s Mississippi. He speaks of the place as though it were his own flesh and blood; considering his childhood, maybe I can say that the city itself raised him. 

First New York fed him, offering up one odd job after another, affording him rent in a cheap Bronx apartment and the necessities of life like hard liquor, psychedelics, and groceries. Then in time it supplied him an identity, one among the characters that only could have existed in this place at this specific time. Interestingly, he never wanted to be a writer. In fact, a large part of the story is dedicated to his discovery of the craft. Throughout the book, writing comes to him like a disease, not by a conscious choice but rather the gradual accumulation of symptoms: among them a propensity to observe, the happenstance presence of flashy things and interesting people, a strong memory, and a lack of formal training in anything that pays. 

But even before reading the first line, we know that reading the book is an act of waiting for a hammer to fall. This house, too, will burn. The AIDS epidemic effectively snuffed out the vibrant “microecology” of gig musicians and drag dancers and avant-garde writers and fashion designers which flourished in Trebay’s time. But he shows us how it is all the more beautiful for its fleeting, for we can savor and see in a way that no-one could at the time, when it seemed like rents would be low and food cheap and music playing forever.

There are many reasons for an autobiography. Some writers do it for money, some to cleanse or admonish themselves, some to try and resuscitate a career, and many others. I don’t claim to know exactly why Trebay wrote Do Something, nor would such an understanding be helpful for me as I try to sell this book to you. I doubt he had only one reason, but the clearest to me is that he hopes his words can preserve a time which cannot ever be again. His approach to storytelling is preservation, not merely of his own life, but of an entire era—a snowglobe, rather than a postcard, if you’ll accept a reaching analogy. And I believe testimony matters from someone like him, someone who survived and is himself both artifact and museum.