| Genre | Journal (163 pp.) |
| Keywords | AIDS, Art of Medicine, Body Self-Image, Caregivers, Communication, Death and Dying, Disease and Health, Doctor-Patient Relationship, Freedom, Grief, Hospitalization, Human Worth, Illness Narrative/Pathography, Individuality, Infectious Disease, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Issues, Loneliness, Love, Medical Advances, Medical Ethics, Men's Health, Mourning, Narrative as Method, Pain, Patient Experience, Power Relations, Psycho-social Medicine, Sexuality, Society, Suffering, War and Medicine |
| Summary | Where many writers about illness have raised questions about the widespread and often unexamined appropriation of military metaphors to describe how doctors and patients have "struggled with," "combatted," "fought," or "defeated" illness, Dreuilhe embraces it and plays it out to the far reaches of its logic. Part of the brilliance of this AIDS narrative lies in the way it brings new dimensions of meaning to a metaphor that has become so conventional as to be cliché or so imbedded in the language of illness and treatment, it simply fails to be recognized as metaphor. Beginning with the "simple skirmishes at the frontier garrisons," Dreuilhe chronicles the progression of his own illness with the sharp eye of a good war reporter who sees through the chaos of the battlefield to the strategies being played out. "Whenever I take an experimental drug," Dreulhe writes, "—and people fight desperately to be among those privileged to risk their lives—I feel as though I belong to a unit of shock troops parachuted behind enemy lines: already written off as a casualty, I'm entrusted with the task of spearheading the advance."
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| Commentary | As sophisticated is his treatment of his own experience of AIDS over the several months of the book's composition, Dreuilhe's chronicle lacks nothing in raw emotion, especially rage against the virus that is killing him. He draws astutely on other writers as diverse as Anne Frank, Susan Sontag, and Marcel Proust to provide literary analogies and philosophical depth to his reflections on his own condition.
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| Publisher | Faber and Faber |
| Edition | 1989 |
| Place Published | London |
| Annotated by |
McEntyre, Marilyn Chandler |
| Date of Entry |
08/19/12 |
| Last Revised |
08/27/12 |
