Paul Monette's Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

703 Words2 Pages

Paul Monette in his autobiography, “Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir” wants to make the younger generation aware of all the mistakes, suffering and deaths his generation went through fighting with AIDS, as he is convinced that it might help the new generation survive. He wrote his life story in 1988, soon after he was diagnosed with HIV and two years after his partner and close friend Roger Horwitz died of AIDS.

Disease split his time into the life before and the life now and it will inevitably take his life as a tribute to its devastating power. Not knowing if he will survive long enough to finish his book, Monette accepted his fate and gave up the hope of getting cured. Still taking his medicine and waiting for a medical breakthrough mostly as a matter of habit, he recognizes that the disease wiped off holidays from his calendar and left only one date to remember – that of his lover’s death.

It is almost impossible for Monette and his friends to determine when the bad times began. Gradually, rumors of a terrible disease became a reality. In 1982, an undefined “gay cancer” became...

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