Holding Breath: A Memoir of AIDS' Wildfire Days

When they met, David was a 41-year-old heroin addict, homeless and dying of AIDS. The author was a 27-year-old, self-absorbed, bar-hopping poet--and his caseworker. In 1989, in New York City, there was nothing "manageable" about AIDS, and David would have only eight more months to live, but they were drawn into a sweet, desperate, forbidden relationship in which the boundary between "client" and "caseworker" dissolved. Living together in secrecy in his little Lower East Side studio for those final eight months, they hoped for the impossible until it was impossible to hope any more. Sixteen years after David's death, the grief that the author had tried to suppress at the time returned with unexpected ferocity, and changed her life once again.