Harsh Cravings, by Jason Haaf

I don’t know if I’m becoming a prude (I doubt it) or a snob (more plausible), but Harsh Cravings just didn’t resonate. Not even a little. I picked it up from the LGBTQ literature table at The Strand, gave it a quick glance, and thought, “Sure, why not?” In hindsight, a longer glance might have saved me a couple of bucks.

The book presents itself as a diary-style memoir: ninety days of first-person reflections on queer life, marriage, ancestry, and pandemic-era New York City. It’s loosely influenced by Mary MacLane and the confessional tradition, and it aims for that unfiltered, anything-goes intimacy that diary writing promises. In theory, I’m on board. In practice…meh.

The biggest issue, for me, is the writing. It aims to have that deliberately raw, diary-like feel, which some readers will probably find authentic. I just found it to be bad. Amateurish. There’s very little sense of style. The entries drift between the mundane and the abstract, often asking big, philosophical questions without ever anchoring them in anything concrete. When the book works (those rare occasions when action and thought are actually linked), it’s actually pretty effective. But too often it veers into vague introspection that feels more like placeholder thinking than insight.

The erotic passages, which clearly aim to be a central component, didn’t do much for me either. That may be a matter of taste, but even setting that aside, they didn’t add much depth to the narrative. They’re just bad porn.

To its credit, the book is a quick read, and there’s a certain value in it as a time capsule of a very specific moment—pandemic isolation, shifting relationships, the search for meaning in a stalled world. I can see how some readers might connect with that immediacy.

But for me, it felt like a draft that needed another pass, or maybe three.