Mortal Embrace: Living with AIDS

Dreuilhe works as a translator, lives in New York City and has AIDS. This short, poignant diary, kept over the course of several months, will give hope and encouragement to persons afflicted with the lethal virus who refuse to take their condition as a death sentence. Military images predominate: AIDS is a tank pulverizing everything in its path; its victims, mostly male, are soldiers forced to wear mental chastity-belts; the author stubbornly resists the impulse to desert (i.e., die). Dreuilhe, who grew up in French Indochina, watches aghast as friends, a lover, neighbors succumb; he invokes Alfred Jarry's Ubu, Proust's Marcel in his bedroom; he voices rage, grief, fear and hope as the disease slowly devastates his body and his personal life. But the act of writing this journal had a healing effect, he reports. Reading it, one realizes more keenly than before how persons with AIDS need support, not ostracism. (September)