Biography & Autobiography |
Nonfiction |
Summary
Summary
"An eloquent testimonial to the power of love and the devastation of loss" from the National Book Award-winning author of Becoming a Man ( Publishers Weekly ).
In 1974, Paul Monette met Roger Horwitz, the man with whom he would share more than a decade of his life. In 1986, Roger died of complications from AIDS. Borrowed Time traces this love story from start to tragic finish. At a time when the medical community was just beginning to understand this mysterious and virulent disease, Monette and others like him were coming to terms with unfathomable loss. This personal account of the early days of the AIDS crisis tells the story of love in the face of death.
A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Borrowed Time was one of the first memoirs to deal candidly with AIDS and is as moving and relevant now as it was more than twenty-five years ago. Written with fierce honesty and heartwarming tenderness, this book is part love story, part testimony, and part requiem.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Paul Monette including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the Paul Monette papers of the UCLA Library Special Collections.
Author Notes
Paul Monette (1945-1995) was an author, poet, and gay rights activist. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Yale University, he moved with his partner Roger Horwitz to Los Angeles in 1978 and became involved in the gay rights movement. Monette's writing captures the sense of heartbreak and loss at the center of the AIDS crisis. His first novel, Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll , was published in 1978, and he went on to write several more works of fiction, poetry, and memoir. Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir , the tender account of his partner's battle with the disease, earned him both PEN Center West and Lambda Literary Awards. In 1992, Monette won the National Book Award in Nonfiction for Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story , an autobiography detailing his early life and his struggle with his sexuality. Written as a classic coming-of-age story, Becoming a Man became a seminal coming-out story. In 1995, Monette founded the Monette-Horwitz Trust, which honors individuals and organizations working to combat homophobia. Monette died in his home in West Hollywood in 1995 of complications from AIDS.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Wrenching in its detail, this account of the author's final two years with his companion and ``beloved friend'' Roger Horwitz, who died of AIDS in 1986, personalizes the epidemic's appalling statistics with heartbreaking clarity. Poet and novelist Monette (Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog) applies admirable candor and control to the task of chronicling the suffering endured in the months between the diagnosis and death of the man with whom he had spent over 10 years. Monette brings to the narrative a poet's eye for the telling image or metaphor, and makes this far more than a simple compendium of medical disasters: the memoir transcends the particulars of the AIDS epidemic to stand as an eloquent testimonial to the power of love and the devastation of loss, the courage of the ill and the anger, fear and dedication of their loved ones. Despite its universal resonances, the book is perhaps most valuable as a vital addition to the literature of the AIDS epidemic. Affluent and exceptionally well connected in the L.A. gay elite, Horwitz was no typical AIDS patient: Monette maneuvered him into various experimental programs (he was the first AIDS patient west of the Mississippi to have access to AZT), and the firsthand glimpse of the ``netherworld of the sick,'' negotiating the byzantine route to the next ``magic bullet'' offers vivid confirmation of the human cost of the government's initial policy of informed neglect. ``A gay man seeks his history in mythic fragments, random as blocks of stone in the ruins covered in Greek characters, gradually being erased in the summer rain,'' the author writes of a trip to Greece he and Horwitz took shortly before the diagnosis. Monette's moving history is just such a fragment for future generations, a touchstone reference to a tragic time that we cannot allow to be erased. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A poignant, day-to-day account of two lovers battling AIDS together. Monette (novels: Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll, 1978; The Long Shot, 1981; Lightfall, 1982) and Roger Horwitz met at a Beacon Hill dinner party on Labor Day, 1974, and it was love at first sight (""We'd been waiting for each other all our lives""). Both were Harvard-educated; Paul then a poet awaiting publication of his first volume, Roger just starting work at a stuffy law firm. In the heady, liberated days of the 70's, they were the ideal couple--handsome, successful, and, although not completely faithful to each other, only mildly promiscuous. They moved out to California in the early 80's, where Paul began working on Arnold Schwarzeneggar screenplays and Roger realized his dream of opening his own law firm. But in early 1985, after nearly a year of mysterious illnesses, Roger was diagnosed as being approximately the 10,000th person in the US to have AIDS. What followed is an inspiring story of battle against a deadly disease. Paul and Roger became medical experts, bullying slow-moving doctors, reaching out through the grapevine for any information at all on AIDS. Roger took part in UCLA's experimental Surinam program--which did more harm than good--but later became one of the first in L.A. to receive the drug AZT (""the AZT poster boy""), which Monette credits with giving him an extra year of life. Despite everything, Roger died on October 22, 1986, just months after Paul learned that he himself had AIDS. Despite flaws that include a slow start and some purple prose ("" 'Oh, God,' said Roger woundedly""), this is a riveting story--the dark, more personal side of Randy Shilts' And The Band Played On (1987). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The prose complement to the 18 eloquent elegies in Monette's Love Alone (Booklist 84:900 F 1 88) is an equally passionate, rushing book. The author records, in nearly hysterical emotional terms, his AIDS-afflicted lover Roger Horwitz' progress through ever more humiliating diseases and treatments until his death some 19 months after diagnosis. Monette avoids spinning out of control by recalling with conversational immediacy as much as possible of Rog's winding down and his own vacillations between hope and despair, anger and exhaustion. The lucidity, concreteness, and everyday focus of the writing hold sentimentality at bay, but not anguish, poignance, or power. Monette makes clear that Rog was valiant, talented, loving, and lovable and that the loss of him was both an excruciating personal tragedy and a calamity to all whose lives he touched as an attorney, a gay activist, and a genuinely wise man. Definitely the best-written AIDS memoir thus far, Borrowed Time has the additional cachet of being a lover's and proudly gay man's account. Without question, it will and should be the memoir sought out and taken to heart by gays, their friends, and supportive family members. RO. 616.97'92 Acquired immune deficiency syndrome
Library Journal Review
``Why don't you write about this? Nobody else does.'' These words, from one of the doctors treating Monette's lover Roger Horwitz during his well-fought but losing battle with AIDS, prompted this book. Purged of the tendency toward jeremiad he displayed in Love Alone ( LJ 4/1/88), poems written during the last months of Rog's life, Monette has fused ``unresolved rage'' with eloquence to produce a gripping, accessible, and essential book. Monette captures the everyday minutiae and roller coaster emotions of living with AIDS, taking us from his first personal exposure to the epidemic via an old friend, through the 19 months between Rog's diagnosis and death. Monette's solipsistic dedication to a community of prosperous, white gay men can be annoying, but the book's strength is that it is always annoyingly, believably real. BOMC alternate.Rob Schmieder, Boston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.