In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic

by Marie Howe, Michael Klein (Editor)

We wanted to collect writing that was smart, funny, reflective, angry, and immediate," says Howe (editor of Poets for Life) in his introduction. Thanks to this broad perspective, the editors have successfully pulled together many voices and viewpoints into a balanced and accomplished collection that includes unknown and often unidentified writers along with Mark Doty, Paul Monette and Harold Brodkey. The late Iris de la Cruz, a former prostitute, drug user and emergency medical technician, writes plainly and openly about her past and about feeling "like I was the only woman in the world with AIDS. It was all gay white men." Christine Boose tells how her best friend from high school discovered she was HIV-positive when she got pregnant, then killed herself. One of several anonymous contributors, a 21-year-old college student, ruminates on why she continues to have unsafe sex, while another anonymous contributor mourns the passing of her drug-addicted daughter, "her girl-child ravaged and addicted and hunted down like an animal." Denise Ribble relates a bizarre incident from New York City's Community Health Project: a woman calls and asks whether she's at risk because she's a lesbian vampire who consumes the menstrual blood of other women. "If I'm really a vampire, I don't have anything to worry about because I'm immortal. But if I'm just a fucked-up woman who drinks other women's blood, I'm at risk aren't I?" Some of this writing is very intense, some is more reflective, but all of it contributes to creating an effective whole.

Genres: Nonfiction, Poetry, M M Romance, Queer

219 pages, Paperback

Published October 17, 1994

About the author

Born in Rochester, New York, Marie Howe attended Sacred Heart Convent School and the University of Windsor. She received an MFA from Columbia University, where she studied with Stanley Kunitz, whom she refers to as “my true teacher.”

Howe has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and NYU. She co-edited (with Michael Klein) the essay anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Reviews

[Annagrace]

I won’t be assigning stars to this book. These are people’s lived experiences. Some are thoughtful and deeply considered reflections on life and death in a pandemic, some are frantic and scared notes to anyone paying attention. None of the essays are carefully crafted responses to politicians or systems of power. They are immediate, they are sad. Sometimes they ramble on and on. That’s what grief sounds like. I don’t want to grade someone’s experience of it. I want to listen.

[Sarah Pascarella · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the COVID pandemic stretches on, I continue to seek out anthologies of those willing to share their experiences with loss, disbelief, fear, pain, endurance, hope - in sum, the struggle to witness, acknowledge, and honor. Ratings seem a little glib for collections like these. Their power is in the record.

[Jennifer Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

As powerful as it is various, this collection compiles essays, letters, diary entries, memoir fragments, and brief anecdotes in an effort to collect and broadcast the many experiences and emotions surrounding HIV/AIDS in America. By compiling the voices of teenagers with nearly no knowledge of the disease with writers whose life work has become an attempt at understanding it, and setting up the writing of doctors alongside the writing of victims, activists, and individuals in mourning, Marie Howe and Michael Klein put together an anthology which is at no point repetitive, and which is at every moment necessary and compelling.

Taken together, the voices here represent uncountable experiences with HIV/AIDS, and a portion of our history which should be noted and remembered even as we continue to deal with HIV/AIDS. Expressing every emotion imaginable--from humor to grief, from anger to confusion to love--the works here are compelling acts of witness and writing, doing a work which is worth reading and sharing.

Recommended.

[Jaykumar B · Rating 5 out of 5]

here is a collection that includes what I ought to call, perspectives... perspectives of the pain of indifference and horror, and the realization of one's mortality in a culture which wants to insist upon its own infinite-ness whilst in the midst of an epidemic... while these works are beautiful, they are also terrible, I'd say Yeats was right, sometimes, "a terrible beauty is born"

[Ezra · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book has beautiful writing about people's experiences living and dying with HIV/AIDS, and many people remembering friends lost. I guess I'm choosing just "it was ok" because this book felt personal but not political (or both).