¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

by JP Brammer

¡Hola Papi! marks the likely apogee of my journey through the literary genre I called “narrative non-fiction” at least since 2015: that fly-on-the-wall storytelling still birthing from fertile grounds every true-crime podcast lighting up the charts. Technically, I believe it falls under the umbrella of “creative non-fiction”—memoir-as-narrative is a different vibe, the written equivalent of retelling a story to your friends but inserting yourself (or a cousin or something) into it so it’s more relatable. To me, the lustre has somewhat worn off the whole thing; after reading the unburnished version—Catch & Kill—laid bare what narrative non-fiction does, the exciting voyeurism of the flashier examples a bit less...palatable.

That’s not to say I don’t trust events in this book. It just that the combination of letter-writing framing device pulled from the author’s advice column, the intense personal essay narrative, and summarized bon mottes—“I found myself having unexpected pangs of nostalgia for Carlos’s house, which I had hated—the asphalt streets, the simple room with its oppressive blank walls. I missed them, I guess because I knew them, and that’s all nostalgia really requires of us.”—doesn’t work for me over so many pages, over and over again. There’s a certain fatigue that sets in when reading this collection en masse that shouldn’t happen, because author is great: he’s one of the few twitter recommendations I make without reservation (IronSpike being the other). We have some art from him happily hanging on the wall.

But as a book, it doesn’t hit quite the same as the internet: there’s nothing else to break up the writing. ¡Hola Papi! doesn’t offer enough variation to its rhythm. And I don’t feel like it should be my burden to parcel out the book across days or weeks, purposefully obscuring how each chapter is structured so similarly to the one before.

As individual essays, they’re fun to read. As a collection—one in which I felt personally invested, thanks to the parasocial nature of social media—I would recommend taking them more slowly than the library allowed me.

But I would still recommend it, because, c’mon, the author’s great!