Alexander Chee

his lover, Raj, who died of AIDS in the, I believe it was the early 90s.

And it's just this stunning

book of poetry where every single poem is breathtaking.

And the whole thing to me at the time that I encountered it as a young man was an education in the depth and breadth of what love meant.

it really profoundly changed me as a person to read it and encounter it.

And yeah, I can't, you know, I think

It also was, I think for me, a way to see how you could take your personal anguish, your personal grief, and transform it into great art.

And to do so with both an intensely personal relationship to the material and also a kind of

selflessness in offering it up to others as a way to help them understand whatever they were going through.

And in fact, this is apparently, for Bram Stoker, it was what inspired Frankenstein.

No, sorry.

Oh my God, Dracula.

Wrong monster.

Yeah, it's a very strange footnote, but... Beautiful, I love it.

The story is out there if you're... The truth is out there if you're interested.

Ooh, so that is a novel that completely turned my sense of what was possible for a novel upside down in the best possible way when I found it as a young person.

And it also inspired my second novel, The Queen of the Night.

I had several friendships and a significant affair as a result of that novel.

I was working at a bookstore and the young man in question came up and acted as if he didn't know that it was my favorite novel and said, can you help me find Jeanette Winterson's The Passion?

And that's how we met.