Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, and: My Brother (review)

My reading choices during the past few years have focused on the subject of HIV&AIDS—partly because I participated in a project at Columbia College, Chicago, that looked at the AIDS virus with all of its complicating factors—social, political, and medical—but also because on December 1, 2006 (the same year as the 25th anniversary of HIV&AIDS), my father moved into our home because he was dying of advanced AIDS. In contrast with AIDS narratives of the past, two years later he moved out of our home—not to hospice, but to his own studio apartment. He had regained enough of his strength to transition to a different, yet autonomous, adult life. His story reveals how having AIDS has changed since the 1980s; but despite medical advancements, there remains an imperative to communicate how the AIDS past plays itself out in the present—and what it means for all of us.

The two AIDS memoirs below are among my favorites for conveying how the AIDS story encompasses the idea of living with the syndrome, rather than only dying from it. When I began reading these works, I assumed they would be depressing for the average reader, but found that regardless of the anguish and loss, these works, with magnificent lyricism, are powerful explorations of human struggles with the "unknown." Read them for the lyricism, remember them for the lessons, and experience how HIV&AIDS are still very much a part of our lives.

Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir PAUL MONETTE HARCOURT BRACE & COMPANY, 1988. 342 PAGES, PAPER, $13.00.

Published in 1988, this lyrical work by Paul Monette (poet and screenwriter who would himself succumb to AIDS in 1995) presents us with a heartfelt recounting of the death of his life partner Roger Horwitz, a man who held a PhD in comparative literature and a law degree from Harvard University. Having become lovers in the mid-1970s in Boston, the two then moved to Los Angeles, the setting for this story and their 19-month personal encounter with HIV&AIDS. Having watched the death toll mount in the 1980s, with word of the disease coming first from New York, then San Francisco, then from Los Angeles, like a "slowly dawning horror," Monette opens the book with how the virus enters their lives. "You are equipped with a hundred different amulets to keep it far away. Then someone you know goes into the hospital, and suddenly you are at high noon in full battle gear. They have neglected to tell you that you will be issued no weapons of any sort. So you cobble together a weapon out of anything that lies at hand, like a prisoner honing a spoon handle into a stiletto. You fight tough, you fight dirty, but you cannot fight dirtier than it."

The documentary-like accounting of diseases, complications, hospital stays, and treatments presses down on a reader; but what sustains us is Monette's coping mechanism: a dark humor that makes him able to hone a "spoon handle into a stiletto." As Monette says after a particularly bad hospital stay, "You either turn a moment like this into a black joke, or you'd never get out of 1028 at all." Through this humor, Monette shows how the mundane aspects of life—moments and abilities that healthy folks take for granted—offer emotional shelter and daily reassurance. As he and Roger focus more on food in order to battle wasting, "We had ceased to count cholesterol. . . . That is a hobby for people who are in for the long haul." The reader never laughs out loud, snickers, or chuckles. But one may smile, nod, and recognize the ways that death helps us to see the places and spaces where absurdity dominates our lives.

The narrative moves predictably from treatment to treatment, from hospital stay to hospital stay. What makes this memoir stand the test of time is...