Brendan Jay Sullivan

Brendan Jay Sullivan entered New York's music world as a writer and DJ, then recorded its nightlife during Lady Gaga's early career. It Books released Rivington Was Ours during 2013, using the subtitle Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives. Sullivan recounts working as a DJ, meeting the not-yet-famous performer, and moving through clubs, apartments, rehearsals, and friendships on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The book is a memoir of a scene as much as a portrait of one artist, preserving the ambitions and improvised communities around a changing neighborhood. Sullivan writes from personal proximity rather than as a conventional outside biographer, so Lady Gaga appears alongside his own coming-of-age and the people who shared those years. Rivington Was Ours combines music memoir, urban history, and eyewitness recollection, capturing a period before international fame transformed both the singer's career and the meaning of the places they knew.