Overview

You Only Live Twice is a double-barreled, non-fiction novel co-authored by young trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artist Mike Hoolboom. Together, and with an assist from the films of Chris Marker, they map out the particularities of what they call "second lives": Chase's transition from female-to-male, and Mike's near-death from AIDS in the 1990s.

YOLT is true fiction, part of the auto-genre wave that includes the diary crypts of Knausgaard, the friendship recordings of Sheila Heti, and the theory-fiction of Maggie Nelson and Chris Kraus.

The unspoken promise was that in our second life we would become the question to every answer, jumping across borders until they finally dissolved. Man and woman. Queer and straight. Only we have two bodies now, the one that gathers sensations and the other one that archives the records. Is it too terrible to admit that we prefer the record, that we find it more reassuring, even more erotic?

Mike Hoolboom is an author and filmmaker based in Toronto. He has written four books, received more than thirty international film prizes, and enjoyed nine international retrospectives of his work.

Chase Joynt is a Toronto-based moving-image artist and writer who has exhibited his work internationally. He recently received a Mellon Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship at the University of Chicago.