I promise, the timing on this is purely coincidental. As I was editing the Further Reading section of The List and the Story I discovered, to my delight, that Wayne Koestenbaum's seminal "My '80s" is now the title essay of his just-released collection, My 1980s and Other Essays!
This Monday I had the pleasure of hearing him read from it at the Franklin Park Reading Series, and fell in love anew with that piece. Can't wait to read the rest, especially the essay on Debbie Harry, whose ubiquitous influence on the late Seventies/early Eighties continues to manifest itself in strange and wonderful ways on the survivors of said epoch.
On that note, I have to also recommend the wonderful Meagan Brothers' YA novel, Debbie Harry Sings in French , whose protagonist is an ostensibly straight teenage boy whose fixation with the Blondie chanteuse leads him to discover that he loves to sing Blondie songs in drag.
OK, not all of the Eighties was so bad.