Winner of a Bronze Medal in the 2019 Foreword Indies Book Awards
“Like everything Hamburger writes, NIRVANA IS HERE is compulsively readable, charming, and suffused with deep humanity. The title is truth in advertising, folks: this novel is nirvana indeed.”
— Elisa Albert, author of After Birth
Two decades after they first met, Medieval Historian Ari Silverman is reconnecting with his high school obsession Justin Jackson, now happily married to a woman and the first African-American CEO of a successful dating website. While preparing to see Justin again, Ari recalls his relationship with Justin in the segregated suburbs of Detroit during the early 1990s and the secrets they still share. At the same time, he’s also grappling with the fate of his ex-husband, a colleague accused of sexually harassing a student. Ultimately the two stories converge, and Ari comes to a fateful decision about his past and present, his life and his inner character. Framed by the meteoric rise and fall of the band Nirvana and the #metoo movement, Nirvana is Here touches on issues of identity, race, sex, and family with both poignancy and unexpected humor.
Combine the sensuality and haunting nostalgia of Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name with the raw emotion of Kurt Cobain’s songwriting, then set it to a 90s-era grunge soundtrack, and you’ve got Nirvana Is Here.
“Who died?”
Not understanding the question, I looked up blankly at Justin from my seat on the bench by the school entrance. A brass plaque indicated it had been donated by a local car dealership in honor of Dalton’s girls’ softball championship team, 1982.
“Why do you look so down in the mouth?” he asked, swinging his briefcase.
I said I was waiting for my mother to take me to karate, and then, maybe because I’d been suppressing the thought for so long, I admitted, “I hate it.”
“Then don’t go.”
“But my mom is coming to take me.”
Justin cocked his head to the side. “Follow me,” he said.
Flattered by the invitation, I went with him to the art room, shut up for the evening. Justin calmly unlocked the door. How did he have the key? “Ms. Hunter likes football players. My buddy Marlin made us all copies.”
Inside, we sat there with the lights out, swiveling on the metal stools and staring at the paint-speckled floor, like a Jackson Pollock painting. “Just hide out here until your karate class is over,” said Justin.
“Don’t you have to be somewhere?” I asked, but I didn’t want him to go.
“It can wait.” He had a lean, hungry look that I liked. I felt uncomfortable on my hard stool, but I didn’t dare move, or do anything that might disturb the moment.
“Want to listen to something?” he asked and pulled out a tape out of his briefcase. The tape was marked on the front: MIX. “This is Nirvana,” he said.
The band’s name, Nirvana, made me think the music would be soothing, New Agey, like Enya. But the song announced itself with a brief guitar snarl, followed by a fury of driving drumbeats and metal. I didn’t usually like loud metal music—it sounded too much like violence—but this song didn’t seem to qualify exactly as heavy metal, with all the sounds fitting together in a pattern. It was more like separate noises, each with its own direction, like the paint splatters on the art room floor.
Just as I got used to it, the noisy part died down, and Kurt Cobain began to sing.
What first caught my attention was the ache in his voice. First he’d mumble, even growl for an unintelligible line or two, then he’d fling out the next few words in a trembling, cracked yelp edged with a nervous resentment, or draw out words with a strange sarcasm. He held a sarcastic yowl for several strained seconds that felt more like ages, giving them a mysterious, eerie emphasis. His voice sounded both tired and anxious, as if he’d been ignored all his life and was finally sick of it. Why will no one listen?
Justin drummed his silver pen against one of the tables along with the song. I wanted to tell him to stop so I could hear everything. I didn’t want to miss a note of it.
The chorus was a storm of guitars, drums, and Kurt Cobain’s ragged yowl. I made out a few words in flashes, like “contagious” and “stupid.” But I didn’t need the words to know what Kurt was feeling, an emotion I too had felt, though I couldn’t name it just then. Yes, I too have been as desperate as you. I was thinking of how I felt right after Mark, when my mother found out and she folded me in her arms, and I grabbed her tightly, rubbed my cheek against her warm sweater, yet it didn’t help.
When Justin shut off the tape, I was perched on the edge of my chair, my brain tingling. I’d never heard a pop song like this, complex like a work of art, with a deep emotional pull like a novel or a movie. By comparison, everything else on the radio sounded candy-coated and fake.
I realized what that feeling was, the one Kurt was singing about. It was anger.
Justin was staring at me, waiting for me to speak. He must have felt as I did about the song, and I wanted so desperately to say something meaningful, important.
“Uh, are they British?” I asked.
“No, they’re American. But not commercial.” He said the word “commercial” with a pained look on his face.
All I could think of was, “Neat.”
“Neat?” he said.
My stomach sank. I’d messed this up. “Why? Was that wrong?”
“No. You never get anything wrong. You’re an intelligent young man.” He ejected the tape from the stereo.
“Why?” I asked. “Wait, what did I do?”
“That’s all I got. I didn’t bring any Julie Andrews to play you,” he said, and left.
Reviews and Interviews
“Like everything Hamburger writes, NIRVANA IS HERE is compulsively readable, charming, and suffused with deep humanity. The title is truth in advertising, folks: this novel is nirvana indeed.”
— Elisa Albert, author of After Birth
“Hamburger is tender and provocative in his examinations of sexual abuse, racial strife in ’90s Detroit, and the way that discovering Nirvana changes everything about Ari’s world. The complexities of this novel are deftly handled by Hamburger, whose sensitive and observant prose is a pure joy to read on every page”
— Electric Literature
“A tender self-reckoning, Nirvana Is Here brings the past full circle. Hamburger deftly reveals how incidents recede—even if they leave their mark—to bring new hopes into focus.”
— Foreword Reviews
“If your idea of Heaven is sitting down with a beautifully written book full of complex, compelling characters, then get ready….Nirvana Is Here! This is a drop-everything, stay-up-way-too-late, unputdownable novel written by an amazingly talented author. Funny, sexy, wise, and thought-provoking, NIRVANA IS HERE is a book that has it all, speaks to our times, and is an absolutely necessary read.”
— Lesléa Newman, author of October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard and Heather Has Two Mommies
“A yearning, generous, coming-of-age journey. Captures both a decade, and those scary, vital moments we reveal who we are, inside. Aaron Hamburger’s prose is alive: what’s here is funny, painful, heartbreaking. If you miss (or missed) the 1990s, read this book – Nirvana Is Here.”
—Brando Skyhorse, author ofThe Madonnas of Echo Park and Take This Man
“Aaron Hamburger’s Nirvana Is Here signals a return to some of his favorite themes and narrative gestures: strong characters clouded by a slight sense of unease about where they have landed in life; nimble, smart dramatizations around important moments that move toward inevitable disclosure; and a formidable commitment to thinking about how a religious upbringing shapes our spiritual and ethical lives, whether or not we remain accepting of those views in adulthood.”
— Lambda Literary Review
“With rich, real characters and an evocative sense of time and place, Aaron Hamburger movingly explores the ways our pasts accompany us into our future lives. NIRVANA IS HERE is tender, wise and deeply affecting.”
— Tova Mirvis, author of The Book of Separation
“A touching, finely wrought portrait of secrets lying like buried ordinance beneath ordinary lives. The delicacy and observational wit of Aaron Hamburger’s prose are a marvel.”
— Louis Bayard, author of Courting Mr. Lincoln
“Aaron Hamburger’s NIRVANA IS HERE is a wonder of a book, often funny, sometimes heartbreaking, and always enormously honest about what it means to be young and in love. As a Jewish Gen-Xer, the novel reminded me exactly of who I once was—and all that I still want to be. NIRVANA IS HERE is a brilliant accomplishment.”
—Lauren Grodstein, author of Our Short History
“Every once in a while, a book comes along that blows me away and “Nirvana Is Here” is one such book… Quite simply, this is a coming of age story but it is also so much more; it is a story of recovery and dealing with both past and present as set against the band Nirvana. . . . Hamburger beautifully captures the decade of the 90s and his characters who come of age then.”
—Reviews by Amos Lassen
“Nirvana is Here is told with irony and a pleasing lightness. . . . Nirvana songs and adolescent musings about Kurt Cobain pepper the book, giving it a gritty, sardonic edge.”
—Jewish Book Council
“Almost impossible for me to put this book down, which is rare for me these days… a beautiful, sad, coming-of-age story that is a heartily welcome addition to the LGBTQ literature pantheon.”
—I Like to Read
“An expertly written, bold, funny, serious novel.”
—The Rupture
“Weaves the elements of growing up in the 1990s, addressing race/privilege/sexuality, confronting awful truths and realizing consequences have meaning throughout your life… A very good read indeed.”
—Queerguru
“Both timely and refreshing in its complexity, Nirvana is Here gets to the heart of matters and revels in the glory of accepting one’s against-the-grain identity.” —Hyype
Interview with Electric Literature
Interview with Midwestern Gothic Literary Journal
Interview with Lambda Literary Review
Interview with Work-In-Progress
Hear Aaron read an excerpt from Nirvana Is Here on the Shelf Talking Podcast
The Making of Nirvana is Here
Nirvana is Here is the story I’ve been writing or trying to write my entire life.
Like the protagonist of the book, I grew up in the segregated suburbs of Detroit, though in the 1980s, not the 1990s, and like the protagonist, I felt very much like an outsider. I remember vividly being a freshman in college in the fall of 1991, sitting on the floor of a friend’s dorm room, when another student came running in, saying, “You have to hear this song” and putting on “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. The song felt so different from anything I’d heard before, and it felt in a way like a kind of permission to be who I was, to claim an identity I’d been running away from for so long in my life.
When I was twelve, I was sexually assaulted by another boy my age, a neighborhood bully who threatened to kill me if I told anyone what he’d done. His threat notwithstanding, I did tell my therapist, who was legally obligated to tell the police. I remember vividly sitting in the police station and being asked if I “wanted it,” which was my assailant’s defense for what he’d done. Because I said no, both to that boy and the police, I was safe. This led me to the wrongheaded conclusion that if I admitted to anyone that I was attracted to other guys, he would be found innocent and I would be found guilty, and my assailant would be set free and could come find me and exact his revenge.
All this is the background material that inspired the fictionalized version of the story of this book. It’s material that for many years, even as an adult, I felt that I had to keep hidden, that somehow others would feel repelled if they knew the truth. In my earlier fiction, I’ve written semi-autobiographical stories, but always with this key fact of my own life erased or shunted off to the side. This book is the first time I’ve attempted to grapple with this subject matter head-on, and it’s been liberating. Suddenly, I feel as though my fiction has taken on a new sense of vitality and honesty that’s liberated me to tell all kinds of stories, not just my own.
I recently wrote an autobiographical essay about this time in my life, which appeared in Tin House magazine, called “Sweetness Mattered.” In the piece, I describe my sexual assault and then how at a new school, I met another boy I liked, to whom I was afraid to confess my true feelings, feeling that at the time, I didn’t fully understand. I found out that he liked a certain kind of candy, and I began bringing him a piece of that candy every day to school—for three years. The gesture felt therapeutic. Even though nothing romantic ever resulted, our budding friendship had a curative effect on me, made me feel as if I weren’t the image of myself that the boy who’d assaulted me wanted me to believe.
When the essay came out, I was shocked by the overwhelming response to it. I had no idea that this part of myself that I’d kept hidden was exactly what people were interested in knowing about me.
In high school, I also discovered that I had an interest and talent in tennis and in painting and drawing. Becoming proficient at both of these also helped me find myself and move toward healing.
Perhaps the strangest part of this whole experience has been that though many of these events are very much in the past in terms of time, in terms of psychic effect they have stayed with me and to a certain extent shaped me. For that reason, I’ve written this story as a braided narrative, with the past story framed by the present, just as fragments of my past have stayed on my mind in my own present life.
As I said earlier, I feel as though I’ve been writing this book in some form or another my entire life, but it wasn’t until the past few years that it occurred to me to shape this material into a single, coherent story, in the form of a novel. Recent political and cultural events regarding the #metoo movement post-dated much of the generative writing process, but as I was completing this book, knowing that other people in my situation were telling their stories gave me courage and inspired me to bring my book across the finish line. In fact, I read several survivor’s stories and psychology books dealing with these issues, and I was shocked by the sense of recognition I experienced as I read all these accounts.