Harry Dodge - My meterorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing

Harry Dodges voice and vision are singular, but his genius is for revealing how each of us is plural. This is a beautiful record of his loves and deaths and ways of making, but even its most intimate moments open out, become portals to other possible worlds. No genre can hold this book. It is a work of tender force, prying open every category. My Meteorite is breathtakingor breathgiving, because the whole thing oxygenates discourse, makes me feel alive.

Ben Lerner

Captivating. My Meteorite holds you in its thrall like a brilliant friendso vulnerable, hot, funny, and casually weird that you dont notice the profundity until youre already walloped by it. Dodge juxtaposes the tenderest of human details with hungry, brain-splitting inquiries into the very premise of life, and these shifts in scale are incredibly moving and provocative. Dont forget to notice that Dodge is a masterful writer; thats how he pulls this whole thing off.

Miranda July

Dodge has offered a new, luminous angle on autobiography that not only traces where the body has beenbut also what it loves, how it thinks and feels within the potent intellectual and physical detritus of its lived world. Reading this book is like being bathed in the bright, gritty sear of a comets tail. But the mark it leaves is stunningly terrestrial: a thumbprint of a mind on papersingular in erudition, hurtfully wonder-struck, and true.

Ocean Vuong

Harry Dodges fierce intelligence and love permeates and shapes every line of this book, which is redolent with loss, desire, and truth. Expansive in scope and intimate in detail, Dodges account of becoming a self while living in a world defined by community lifts the spirit as it feeds the mind. A major achievement.

Hilton Als

Harrys book is outside the book. Why should you read it? Youre out there too. I could say this is the smartest memoir I ever read but thats pulling us back to the safe place. We are animals, machines, friends, reading things and weve never been talked to this way before. Seductive and wise, My Meteorite is the conversation you want.

Eileen Myles

Picasso wrote meteoric poetry and now Harry Dodge has written a brilliant autobiographical manifesto that takes the accidents of death and birth and remixes them into a whirlwind unlike any book I can remember reading. Dodge stares into the eye of synchronicity and turns magical thinking into a new method of being realistic about how strange and open-ended the world actually is. Reading My Meteorite, I feel re-enchanted, all over again, with how miraculous an enterprise writing can be, when it is engaged with the degree of passion, inquisitiveness, and arrowy verbal virtuosity that Dodge brings to the game. Feel your whole body tingle as you read this blazing ode to randomness, to a cosmos where every particle and wave has a say in the matter.

Wayne Koestenbaum

A thought-filled, deeply moving and personal book. The past, present, and future collide like Harrys meteorite to earth. Life is tenderly felt, questioned, and affirmed within the pages of this exquisite prose.

Catherine Opie

Riveting. A freewheeling, feral romp through the wilderness of consciousness and connection!

Eula Biss

How does one write a self that is constantly changing, remaking itself with each new experience? Harry Dodge does this with heart and intelligence in this raucous, tender book. An utterly absorbing tombola of subjects, a book about infinity, and possibilityof love, our own identities, the geographical boundaries of the universe. Its a profound piece of work, and I feel honored to have read it. A modern masterpiece.

Sinad Gleeson

PENGUIN BOOKS

MY METEORITE

Harry Dodge is a writer and visual artist whose work has been exhibited at venues nationally and internationally. His solo and collaborative work is held in numerous institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2017, Dodge was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

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An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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Copyright 2020 by Harry Dodge

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Although innumerable beings have been led to Nirvana from Knots by R. D. Laing, copyright 1970 by R. D. Laing. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUB LICATION DATA

Names: Dodge, Harry, author.

Title: My meteorite, or, Without the random there can be no new thing / Harry Dodge.

Other titles: Without the random there can be no new thing

Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2020] |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019029706 (print) | LCCN 2019029707 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143134367 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525506201 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Dodge, HarryPsychology. | Dodge, HarryAnecdotes. | Human behavior.

Classification: LCC N6537.D562 A35 2020 (print) | LCC N6537.D562 (ebook) | DDC 709.2dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029706

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029707

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

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FOR MAGGIE, WITH ALL MY LOVE

My mother dreams that she went with me as an adult to look for me as a little boy: that together we ask people whether theyve seen this child go by, ask the woman in the caf whether hes been there demanding a lemonade, ask the horses on the merry-go-round whether hes ridden them, ask the waves whether hes drowned.

HERV GUIBERT