Hospital Time

by Amy Hoffman

Hospital Time is a memoir about friendship, family, and caregiving in the age of AIDS. Amy Hoffman, a writer, lesbian activist, and former editor of Gay Community News, chronicles with fury and unflinching honesty her experience serving as primary caretaker for her friend and colleague, Mike Riegle, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Hoffman neither idealizes nor deifies Riegle, whom she portrays as a brilliant man, devoted prison rights activist, and very difficult friend.
Hoffman became central to Riegle’s caregiving when he asked her to be his health-care proxy, and although she willingly chose to do this, she explores her conflicting feelings about herself in this role and about her involvement with Riegle and his grueling struggle with hospitalization, illness, and, finally, death. She tells of the waves of grief that echoed throughout her life, awakening memories of other losses, entering her dreams and fantasies, and altering her relationships with friends, family, and even total strangers.
Hoffman’s memoir gives voice to the psychological and emotional havoc AIDS creates for those in the difficult role of caring for the terminally ill and it gives recognition to the role that lesbians continue to play in the AIDS emergency. A foreword by Urvashi Vaid, former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, offers a meditation on the politics of AIDS and the role of family in the lives of lesbians and gay men.

Genres: LGBT, Memoir, Nonfiction, Queer, Disability, Biography Memoir

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Amy Hoffman is a writer, editor, and long-time LGBTQ community activist in Boston. She is editor in chief of Women's Review of Books and on the creative nonfiction faculty of the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College. When she is not writing, she likes reading, cooking, biking, yoga, and hanging out with her friends & her spouse, Roberta Stone. Hoffman is available to visit your book group.

Reviews

[Serafina · Rating 4 out of 5]

was only supposed to read extracts of this for a class but ended up reading the whole thing. just tragic and so moving, as you'd expect from a narrative about hiv/ aids, but also so interesting and refreshing.

firstly, it has been really useful bc it's given me food for thought for my upcoming dissertation; it's a good example of queer temporality/ non-chrononormativity since having hiv/ aids or caring for someone with it impacts how you experience and see time and timings of life, and also the liminality of the hospital sort of suspends normal perceptions of time.

loved how hoffman describes mike as smelly and mean and flawed - it's so different to most other aids/ illness narratives you read which tend to idealise people with aids or any other illnesses, and actually really humanises him. he's just a guy with flaws and idiosyncrasies who says things he shouldn't and doesn't shower enough, but he doesn't deserve to die. it's a horrible experience to watch him deteriorate even though he isn't a paragon of virtue.

also really liked how honest hoffman was about her feelings. again, there's an expectation that carers are morally faultless, tireless and benevolent by nature, but hoffman exposes the actual conflicts and gritty nature of caring for someone, and doesn't shy away from saying negative things.

just overall very sad but also very candid and well written

[t · Rating 4 out of 5]

raw and rough

[ava g · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was...rough. I cried multiple times, but not sob-crying. Just with quiet understanding (or at least, some extent of it). In this book, Hoffman is brutally honest. And it hit me so often because I saw similar fears to mine placed in a wildly different situation. And she announced them to the world - she announced that she was mad at Michael, that she was jealous of his other friends and didn't remember his friendship as light and easy. He was a strong man, a dedicated one, but also an asshole - she said that, even though he died of AIDS. And I don't think that's bad, I think it's brave. She portrayed that AIDS is not some tragic event that turns people into angels. It's hell, it's misery and suffering, and it kills regular, real people. Often gay men. It leaves many lesbians behind to mourn their friends, just as she did. And she never believed that there was some higher purpose, that his spirit lived on - only his memory. And as someone torn between spirituality and realism, that hit me as profound. I think I'll end my forensics piece of this with the section about the Great Blue Heron - after his memorial, a friend spotted the bird and announced that it had to be his spirit. And Hoffman writes, "I wish more than anything I believed that."

[Sara · Rating 1 out of 5]

The description was better than the book itself. I feel like she had so much to work with, so much material given her situation, but instead she wrote very dryly, often about irrelevant things. She barely paints a portrait of Mike (the AIDS victim that the book is described to be mainly about) and leaves him as little more than a slightly eccentric man who had AIDS.
There was absolutely no sequential order to this book, one page Mike is on his deathbed, the next he is buying a hat. She describes more of what she feels about random situations rather than the situation itself and is often repetitive in her descriptions.
Even though the book was only 150 or so pages long, it seemed she was running out of material near the end, and some of the final sections just seemed to be filler material that bored me half to death.

Bummer, I was really anticipating reading this after reading the description. I will be finding another book on the topic.

[honor · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was such an interesting exploration of grief and memory - particularly complicated grief, grieving someone you loved, but didn’t like. it doesn’t brush off anything or sugarcoat anything - just presents one person’s story, unsympathetic in places and hard to read, but so, so worth it. it shocked me as someone who is so used to reading only positive things about victims of AIDS, but i hugely respected the fact that Mike was presented as a person, rather than just a victim.

[Basmaish · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am not having a good start with my 2019 books. Must rectify that.

The description of the book is quite misleading to the content.

[ND]

A moving memoir of an impossible era.

[fh n · Rating 4 out of 5]

rare 1 sitting read for me which is cherished, dug up a lot of the grief i have been trying to bury over the last few weeks, less cherished. from one bad mourner to another thank you amy.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for a class, really liked!

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Review originally posted on my livejournal account: http://intoyourlungs.livejournal.com/...)

Why I Read It: Required reading for my Religious Themes in Literature class.

This is the second work of non-fiction (outside of textbooks) that I've read in as many years. This is a disclaimer I want to make because having read so little non-fiction will affect my review of this book.

Hospital Time chronicles Amy Hoffman's struggle while taking care of her friend Mike who's dying from AIDS. It also touches upon Hoffman's frustrations with watching many of her friends within the gay community suffer and die of AIDS.

This may potentially sound redundant, but one of the most striking things about this memoir is how unflinchingly honest it is, in all its facets: Hoffman's contradictory and less than noble feelings regarding being Mike's caretaker, her mourning process and her frustrations with the way other people mourn Mike's passing, her less than flattering memories of Mike and his behaviour, etc etc. I have to applaud Hoffman's bravery for writing so honestly, about herself and about others. It can't be easy recognizing such undesirable traits within one's self, nor could it have been easy putting out a book that talked about Mike so candidly when other people who loved him were probably still alive and potentially reading the book.

While I really appreciate Hoffman's brutal honesty, I'm sad to say that I never really connected with her writing. I can't put my finger on exactly what it was that didn't jive with me though. She writes very fluidly, jumping from scene to scene and rarely in any kind of chronological order. It felt very stream-of-consciousness, like Hoffman wrote things down as she remembered them and left it that way. I don't think it was the unchronological order that threw me off though.. it just felt like.. I don't know. Like it was TOO personal. It feels like you're RIGHT in Hoffman's head, and while I can appreciate that from afar, it somehow hampered my reading experience.

Final Verdict: If you're at all interested in reading literature concerned with the AIDS epidemic, I wholeheartedly suggest reading this. It's a very intimate look at a woman's struggle to cope being a care-giver for her friend with AIDS and not doing so completely selflessly. Hoffman's brutal honesty is easily the highlight of this book and is something I applaud Hoffman for (there's no way writing and coming to terms with the stuff Hoffman does could have been easy). Despite this though, I still didn't find myself really connecting with the book, though I'm still not sure why. Either way, it was a fairly engaging read and I'm not sorry to have read it.

[packas · Rating 3 out of 5]

an essential read

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was so honest it was hard to read. Its a glimpse into the lives and communities of people who have AIDS and are dying. The writer had to go through all these complicated feelings about herself and guilt and motivation and all kinds of other things. The main man had to go through an unending relationship with pain, and trying to be himself, despite his body rapidly deteriorating. He was a prison book programmer out in Massachusettes. It was interesting to have connection to the people who 25 years later are still packing, knowing that this man was one of them, and he is in a book.

Lately I have been feeling like established people are not that far away, and that someday I will bump into my literary heroes.

Also one main idea that I got out of this book is so obviously happening. The idea of the friend family vs the blood family. And how all the stigma surrounding AIDS can create a family outcasting that leads to your friends cleaning up your shit and your family just showing up for the funeral, and your friends trying to be polite to them. It's so effing sad.

[Sarah Swedberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I teach a unit about AIDS in the US in the 1980s and 1990s in my LGBT class. I have been struggling with the question of how to teach 17-21 year olds about the pre-treatment AIDS crisis. This was one really good answer to the question, "How can I let them see this other world."

Like so many lesbians in the 1980s and 1990s, Amy Hoffman stepped in, somewhat willingly, to care for her friend Mike.

This is an honest account. Amy is often furious at Mike and at the world around her. She does the best she can, but the government has not responded and wider America doesn't care that gay men are dying of AIDS. Amy (and around the country, thousands of people like her) stepped in to provide care and love in the time of crisis.

[Dee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gritty, confessional, painful, and true. Delves into chosen families, AIDS, sociology of medicine, and the nature of interpersonal relationships.