Bare Life is the third volume in The Eldorado Trilogy, following The Lede to Our Undoing and Ojo. It checks in on the lives of the characters in the first two volumes, forty years after the action left off––though reading the first two volumes isn't a requirement for understanding events. If The Lede and Ojo are about finding love in a homophobic and HIV-endangered world, Bare Life asks what it means to have survived and even thrived despite those challenges. But it also poses the question, Survived and thrived how? At what cost? And to whom? It wonders, Have we really arrived, or is it just something we tell ourselves? And if what we considered success in early life turned out not to be as satisfying as we hoped or predicted, what did we miss? What would we change? The novel thinks about shifts in the category queer, how it has opened up to a whole host of new ways of being, new identities, and challenges both inside and outside of a queer community in dealing with age, class, gender, race, religion, and other ways of being human.

"A fierce elegy in mosaic, this final entry in Mengay’s Eldorado Trilogy (after Ojo) contemplates love, loss, art, sex, and 'those dismal and dispiriting realizations that your country was run by a government of bigots.' Bare Life continues the story of twins Jake and Wren, introduced in The Lede to Our Undoing, in New York City and the small Western town of Eldorado, where in the present a nephew faces life after they’re gone—and questions of what to do with the 'letters, journals, sketchbooks, canvases' left behind now that the world—and the art market—has embraced Jake’s work posthumously. Mengay adopts a range of voices and perspectives to fill out these lives, offering spirited accounts of art-world scandals and disappointments 'at the height of the panic about the ‘gay disease’'; raucous and incisive discussions of religion and power and life in what one character calls 'Puritania'; a bracing set piece of chapters in the voice of a young Russian man falling for the older Jacob; and much more." -- Booklife