Sometimes you have to reread a book. Sometimes you have reread a book even if you don’t want to, because you know it will make you literally sick. Rereading this heartbreakingly beautiful and harrowing book, I fall asleep every night sobbing. In part because it is just so hard to believe that anything this intolerable actually existed in reality. Also because the two men whose love story this is – Paul and Roger –  are so familiar, so much like so many friends I had; psychotically educated, seethingly smart, overachievers who excelled at everything, from the halls of Ivy League privilege, yet bohemian also – the way no one is now – erudite, polemical, social, warm, with ideas and taste and joie de vivre, who were interesting and read and liked to have conversations. I miss them. For those who have been touched by this personally and moreover for those who weren’t, this book is a historical document as well as a literary one, a searing history and a touchstone reference to a grim time that we can’t allow to be forgotten.
Borrowed Tim an Aids Memoir by Paul Monette
