“[The] account of her affair with Richard Hell… described in sentences that are at once clipped and conversational has become a word-of-mouth hit”
A brilliant new @nytimes piece on #AYearonEarthWithMrHell by Young Kim!
Book availability info below 👇https://t.co/z0e5BDurHz
— Omnibus Press (@OmnibusPress) February 16, 2024
The New York Times wrote an article about “A Year on Earth With Mr. Hell”, a self-published, sex-heavy memoir from a first-time author that has become a viral hit. Nick Hornby and Bret Easton Ellis are a few who have sung the book’s praises. Hornby called it “the most graphically effective sex writing I’ve read in a long time.”
The author is Young Kim who was the romantic partner of Malcolm McLaren in the last decade of his life. In 2015, she met Richard Hell, a punk rock star from the bands Television and the Heartbreakers, at a gala. “He emitted a sexiness that literally knocked me off balance” she wrote in the book.
Hell and Kim at the gala where they first met
They only met four times after that first meeting and Richard Hell has disavowed the book calling it “revenge porn”.
The book got its start after he asked her to write a few lines about what they’d done together sexually. She says he loved it and that she loved writing it. Richard himself has focused on writing since his punk rock days, writing an acclaimed memoir, two novels, amongst other things.
On the book he says: “How would you feel if you dated someone briefly, including having sex, and it turned out that they were writing about it behind your back and eventually published that misbegotten, uncomprehending — but full of false detail — account of the affair, with a focus on the sex, using your real name?”
Kim defended herself saying: “In writing this book I have only done what men have done unapologetically (and I do not think they should apologize) since time immemorial: choose my work over my relationship.”
She’s contemplating writing a sequel.
Source
