Little by little over the last few years, “A Year on Earth With Mr. Hell,” a self-published, sex-heavy memoir by an unknown author, has become a word-of-mouth hit among artists and writers.
The novelist and screenwriter Nick Hornby called it “gripping.” The critic Greil Marcus described it as “the most graphically effective sex writing I’ve read in a long time.” Capitalizing on its cult success, the Standard, High Line, a hotel in New York that makes an appearance in its pages, has placed copies in some suites and is selling the book through its website.
The author is Young Kim, who was the romantic partner of the punk rock impresario and provocateur Malcolm McLaren in the last decade of his life. In “A Year on Earth With Mr. Hell,” Ms. Kim, 52, chronicles the first 10 months of her affair with another punk icon, Richard Hell, who recorded his 1977 anthem “Blank Generation” (as Richard Hell and the Voidoids) after putting in time as a member of the influential bands Television and the Heartbreakers.
Mr. Hell, 74, and Mr. McLaren, who died at 64 in 2010, have been inextricably linked in punk lore, and now they share the dedication page — “For Malcolm and Richard” — in Ms. Kim’s book.
“I do think I was a kind of muse to Malcolm,” she said in an interview at the Crosby Hotel in Lower Manhattan. “Richard is my muse.” Though he inspired Ms. Kim to write, Mr. Hell said he does not approve of her book, calling it “revenge porn.”
Ms. Kim met him in 2015, when he presented the Malcolm McLaren Award to the artist Edgar Arceneaux at the Performa biennial in New York. “He emitted a sexiness that literally knocked me off balance,” Ms. Kim writes of Mr. Hell in the book’s introduction, “in spite of the fact that his shirt was unbuttoned practically to his navel — something that normally repulses me. Somehow, he got away with it.”
