Hold Me Closer: The Tiny Cooper Story by David LevithanDutton Books (Penguin), 2015

In Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan, one of the title characters is best friends with a guy named Tiny Cooper, who’s a self-described “loud and spectacular” gay football player who has written a musical about his life (1). This is that musical: as the title page puts it, it’s “A musical in novel form/Or, A novel in musical form.” Which is to say, it’s mostly in song, though there are some spoken lines and also some prose passages, the best of which are in the form of the stage directions. The plot covers Tiny’s life from birth to age sixteen, and includes things like him coming out (first to himself, then to his parents and his best friend and the football team, who all already know) and a “Parade of Ex-Boyfriends,” all explaining why things didn’t work out—”Ex-Boyfriend #1: You’re too clingy. Ex-Boyfriend #2: “You’re too sing-y” (85). I probably would have liked this book more if I were more musically inclined and/or liked musical theatre more. I couldn’t always imagine how the songs were meant to sound, and I got some of the musical theatre jokes/references, but definitely not all of them. E.g. I was amused that the song for Tiny Cooper’s birth is “a big, lively, belty number—because, let’s face it, if Elphaba got to sing “Defying Gravity” at the start of Wicked, she’d be much, much happier throughout the entire show” (9). And I got the Rent jokes. But I’ve never seen/heard Damn Yankees or South Pacific or various other shows mentioned. But even so, this was a fun read, and Tiny is a pretty excellent character.