Paul Monette, in Borrowed Time: an AIDS Memoir, writes about the last nineteen months of his lover Roger Horwitz's life, after Roger was stricken with AIDS. This study will focus on the love between the two men, rather than on the terrible disease which brought their relationship to an end on this earth. The book can certainly be read as simply another work about AIDS, but when one sees first that the author is writing out of a focus on love for Roger and for their time together rather than out of a focus on the disease which tore them apart and killed Roger.
Of course, it is especially difficult to focus on the love when so much that goes on between Paul and Roger has to do with the disease and its effects. This is especially true when the reader realizes that the book's beginning and end refer to the fact that the author himself is carrying the virus that killed his lover.
I don't know if I will live to finish this. Doubtless there's a streak of self-importance in such an assertion, but who's counting? . . . All I know is this: The virus ticks in me. . . . I used up all my optimism keeping my friend alive. Now that he's gone, the cup of my own health is neither half full not half empty. Just half (1-2).
Thus the journey of Paul and Roger's love begins, in Paul's words, and in Paul's recollection. In other words, the book begins after Roger has died, after Paul has himself acquired the virus, and after the prevailing factor in Paul's own life has become another imminent death--his own.
And here is the end of the book, which effectively coincides with the beginning of the book:
. . . The machine answered the phone. after the beep a voice said: "This is UCLA Medical Center calling. Mr. Roger Horwitz died. . . . " Bernice and I hugged each other briefly, without a word, and I swam back to bed for the end of the night, trying to stay under the Dalmane [a drug]. Putting off as long as I could the desolate waking to l...