Joe Brainard: I Remember

The American artist’s much-imitated memoir, described by Paul Auster as “one of the few totally original books I have ever read.” Joe Brainard’s I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic, praised and admired by writers from Paul Auster to John Ashery and Edmund White. As autobiography, Brainard’s method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain “I remember”: “I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail.” Brainard’s enduring gem of a book has been issued in various forms over the past thirty years. In 1970, Angel Hair books published the first edition of I Remember , which quickly sold out, he wrote two subsequent volumes for Angel Hair, More I Remember (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both of which proved as popular as the original. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York published Brainard’s I Remember Christmas , a new text for which he also contributed a cover design and four drawings. Excerpts from the Angel Hair editions appeared in Interview , Gay Sunshine , The World and the New York Herald . Then in 1975, Full Court Press issued a revised version collecting all three of the Angel Hair volumes and added new material, using the original title I Remember . This complete edition is prefaced by poet and translator Ron Padgett.