The Steve Project

War, madness, trans-generational trauma, addiction, the unsettling fickleness of memory, troubled masculinity, and the sexual revolution – all these themes are woven through this kaleidoscopic memoir. Based on a voluminous family archive of letters, articles, photographs, videotapes and diaries, it follows the life and times of Steve Kraus, a flamboyant bohemian journalist, active in the sex industry and underground press of downtown New York, whose prosperous Jewish family fled Poland in 1939. Steve’s life story encompasses the great events of the twentieth century: the aftermath of World War I; the Holocaust; the American Cold War; the wildness and activism of the 1960s; the sexual liberation of the 1970s, the greed-is-good decades of the 80s and 90s, and onward to the turn of the millennium. The author is the only one of his three children who survives. When she inherited his archive, she turned to it to resolve some puzzling aspects of her father’s life. How did Steve, born into affluence and assimilation, end up writing for SCREW magazine and living in semi-squalor in the East Village? Why was he so obsessed with sex? What did it mean to live an entirely pleasure-seeking life, rejecting all conventional notions of respectability? As she works on the project, she comes to see that the madcap comedy of her father’s hedonism cannot withstand the pull of the central tragedy of his life – and hers. Gradually, the narrative shifts inexorably toward Steve’s sons, Ben and David, as they navigate young adulthood, and fall prey to addiction. The archive begins insistently to address other questions that the author hadn’t planned to ask. Why did both of her beloved brothers die untimely deaths after decades of struggling with heroin abuse and alcoholism? Why did they descend into such deep loneliness and alienation? As well as hereditary mental vulnerabilities and parental alcoholism, another curse is at work – warped ideas of manhood, and the damage they cause to women and men. Despite the darkness at the heart of this story, The Steve Project is not a misery memoir. It is not a primer on self-care, triumph over adversity or recovery. It traces the tides of history and their influence on human affairs. It explores the fragility and unreliability of memory in the attempt to understand why things went so wrong in one family. Above all, it is about how to keep loving people when they have a hard time loving themselves.