RIP Jim Knipfel

Jim Knipfel, Jun 2, 1965 — Oct 7, 2026

A great American writer passed away two weeks ago.

Jim Knipfel was probably best known for his weekly (sometimes bi-weekly, sometimes monthly) essays in the NY Press in the 1990s. That’s how I first found him, and it’s probably how most did.

The NY Press was a weird bird. An independent weekly in NYC that I first picked up for all the usual independent weekly reasons, namely film, music and art listings, and (sometimes) film reviews (read Matthew Zoller Seitz, avoid Armond White). Politically their “news” articles leaned right, I guess in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the Village Voice, but it always seemed like libertarian trolling to me. Like they were too eagerly trying to get attention and pull the spotlight away from the Voice.

I don’t think I ever read more than a headline of any of that stuff.

But what I truly loved most about the NY Press was their first-person essays: Jonathan Ames, Amy Sohn, William Monahan, Ned Vizzini, Dave Eggers and Jim Knipfel.

Knipfel described the output of this collective as “rants and first-person accounts of terrible lives.”

I loved it.

Knipfel’s own column was called SLACKJAW and I read it religiously. The subject was Jim’s own life – it was chaotic, hilarious, angry and properly judgmental. I was in my mid-20s, newish to NYC (at least as an adult) and there were times when the sadness of the city could be a crushing ache.

Reading about Jim’s hard life didn’t make me feel better. It was reading about how Jim looked at other peoples’ lives that helped me.

A little bit like the Harry Dean Stanton line in REPO MAN, “Ordinary fucking people…” But there was more to Jim’s perspective. There was that undeniable hard edge, but his heart and humanity always found a way in.

Jim had a rare genetic eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa that was quickly taking his sight. He had an inoperable brain lesion that caused seizures. He was angry. He drank far too much (or not enough – it’s a question of perspective). And he was a hell of a writer.

When I was in that horrifying period of requesting blurbs for my novel BROOKLYN MOTTO, I made a dream list of writers that I loved, respected and in many ways OWED, and Jim was near the top. I tracked him down on Facebook, cold emailed my request and he wrote back almost immediately.

He said he’d read the manuscript, but no promises. “Just put it in a Word document, though,” he said. He needed his text to voice app to be able to read it to him. He’d been legally blind since the mid-1990s, but that can mean a whole range of blindness. Now, it seemed, he was finally at the darkest end of that scale.

Luckily for me, he loved the novel, and he gave me a pretty cracking blurb: “A wonderful, sharp and snazzy read that puts the big screws to detective fiction conventions. The real star here, though, is the NYC of 1998, a forgotten, pre-digital New York of payphones, dollar vans, sidewalk eccentrics, East Village dives and shabby one-bedroom walkups that were still affordable.”

I was over the moon.

We started an email correspondence after that, mostly centered around long-gone Brooklyn bars and the chaotic nights that were their frequent soundtrack.

I assumed he was using voice to text to compose the emails – they had the same biting voice of his SLACKJAW column – but he wrote them so goddamned fast (and they were long). I would carefully write my response and basically copy edit it, panicked that something in my words would reveal that I was not a “real” writer worth chatting with. He’d crank his response back to me five to ten minutes after I’d sent him mine. He wasn't editing, he was just letting it flow and yet the text was still rich with his usual biting observations and beautiful prose.

At some point, I slowed down in my response time and apologized. He wouldn’t have it. He’s here to converse with if I have the time; if not, no worries.

We hadn’t emailed for six months or so. He never told me he was ill, but I don’t think he told many people.

After I heard about his passing, I reread SLACKJAW. It’s just as perfect as it ever was. Please do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. Or of THE BUZZING. Or THE NAIROBI TRIO. Or any of the work, really.

Richard Sandomir wrote a wonderful obituary in The New York Times yesterday. Take a minute and give it a read.

Jim was proof you didn’t need good eyesight to observe, but he’d probably be the first to tell you it helps a hell of a lot.

RIP.

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Jim Knipfel's memoir SLACKJAW open on my lap.