I felt, after the AIDS crisis, as if I had been one person before it and another after it. I lost so many friends, collaborators, colleagues, and then finally, my own lover, I felt like the shell-shocked survivor of a war after it at least abated somewhat. Then my two sisters and both my parents died, and I became someone whose topic, no matter how veiled it is, is grief and loss. I am a living coffin on its way to a funeral to the sound of a cortège I composed.
I wrote
Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera
Mark Doty writes of a time when his lover Wally was dying of AIDS. They were living in Provincetown on Pearl Street. It was recommended to me by my friend, the poet Michael Klein. I read it immediately following my partner Jeffrey’s death from AIDS when I was deranged and inconsolable.
Mark’s descriptions of daily life, including never-ending exquisite descriptions of walking his dog Beau along the ocean, hypnotized me as if it were not a book but a spell. After I finished the book, I tracked down Mark and told him he had to be my friend, and we were, for a summer.
HEAVEN'S COAST is an anatomy of loss: tender, heartbreaking, consoling and, ultimately, incredibly moving. Beginning with the first onset of AIDS and its lengthening shadow over a blissful relationship, the book follows the shifting patterns between two loves as the illness takes hold - the change in them and the change in the way they perceive the world, through the lens of grief. Doty examines the nature of AIDS as opposed to other illnesses, the responses of society, the frustration of medical care and the exhausting - and occasionally uplifting - burden of caring for the dying at home.
Marie’s poems are separated into three sections: childhood (which included an alcoholic and abusive father), the illness and death of her brother Johnny from AIDS, and life beyond his death, including her relationship with James Shannon, a tree surgeon and a fisherman. They were like lifelines to me after Jeffrey died.
I memorized the title poem and said it repeatedly in my head like a litany. These poems are clearly spoken; life boiled down to a stock with the healing power of fresh air and cool water. No other book of poems has ever helped me so much through a catastrophic time, and I ended up setting many of these poems to music.
Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive. What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe's writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a…
One morning, Christopher’s fiancé, Brigid, kissed him goodbye and went into the snowy morning of Montpellier, Vermont, to drive to work. She was sidewinded by a speeding car and killed.
Christopher wrote a devastating memoir of shock and coming to terms with such a sudden loss. Brigid was also a beautiful writer, and part of his healing and writing this book involved folding her highly evocative journals into his book. It felt like a resurrection.
Ironically, Christopher and Brigid lived in a house that Mark Doty either rented or sold. As I read this astonishing book, I felt like I was living there with them, roiling in shock and pain.
Over the years, IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT OF A WATER LANDING has helped to guide many thousands of readers down the treacherous, forking paths of grief. This literary memoir will appeal to anyone—man or woman, married or single—who has lost someone beloved, or who has felt soul-nourished by C.S. Lewis's A GRIEF OBSERVED, its penetrating honesty, how it illuminates the terrain of our shared mortality here on Earth. See YouTube: "Writing from Grief and Loss" and "Christopher Noël discusses Grief Memoir." The Philadelphia Inquirer: "A gifted novelist, Noël writes his heart out in this book. Water Landing captures the tormented…
Terry Tempest Williams is a Utah-based poet and naturalist who writes in this book about her mother's devastating cancer diagnosis and the rising of the Great South Lake in 1983, which was endangering the bird population by which Terry measured her life.
The way she interweaves the human world with the natural world and how interconnected everything is, in some ways, in my memory, reminds me of the same power Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast had for me, in that I was mesmerized out of my misery by the incredibly specific descriptions of sights and sounds and even smells.
Her mother’s illness and the tragedy that was occurring in the lake were somehow embroidered together to feel like the same story. When my opera The Grapes of Wrath premiered in Utah in 2008, it was as if Terry’s exquisite book had iconized the state for me. Coincidentally, it was Mark Doty who recommended it to me as I stood crying at his gate by his stunning rose garden the first time I sought him out in Provincetown after reading his book.
In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms…
I didn’t know if I could recommend a play here, but reading this one is how I first experienced it because it premiered in London. I hadn’t seen it yet, so I read its two monumental parts, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika,” on a typewritten marked-up rehearsal script someone had lent me.
Quite simply, Tony Kushner wrote THE play for my generation, a generation that lost probably half of itself to an awful plague most people, especially the government, ignored until it was too late. When my lover Jeffrey died, I went to the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park and wept because Tony had given it to me in his play, a monument for the AIDS generation.
Finally seeing it on Broadway, with Jeffrey, as he was dying, was like having my DNA scratched and resurfaced into something other than who I was before it. It was shape-shifting, soul-stirring, and salve for a huge gaping wound. And its inclusion of EVERYTHING, religion, race, history, politics, and sex somehow makes sense to me as a recommendation in harmony with my book. There is even a chapter in my book ON Tony Kushner.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes includes Part One, Millennium Approaches and Part Two, Perestroika
“Glorious. A monumental, subversive, altogether remarkable masterwork…Details of specific catastrophes may have changed since this Reagan-era AIDS epic won the Pulitzer and the Tony, but the real cosmic and human obsessions—power, religion, sex, responsibility, the future of the world—are as perilous, yet as falling-down funny, as ever.” –Linda Winer, Newsday
"A vast, miraculous play... provocative, witty and deeply upsetting... a searching and radical rethinking of American political drama." - Frank Rich, New York Times
At eight years old, I pulled The Victor Book of Opera off my piano teacher’s bookshelf, and my world shifted on its axis. Though scandal, sadness, and confusion would shake my world over the next few decades, its polestar remained constant. Music has been the guiding force of my life; through it, I have survived great sorrow and captured the depths of my emotions in song.
Hopefully, I have written with humor, insight, and candor about my life and work as a tumultuous youth on Long Island, my artistic collaborations and obsessions, the creation of my compositions, my addictions and the abuses I endured, and the loss of my partner to AIDS and the devastation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.
Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
