This Triangle Classics edition brings together Paul Monette's three most celebrated works: 'Borrowed Time; An AIDS memoir', 'Love Alone; Eighteen Elegies for Rog' and 'Becoming a Man; Half a Life Story'.
Widely considered a landmark personal chronicle of the AIDS epidemic, 'Borrowed Time' (1988) depicts the day-to-day battles Monette and his 'beloved friend' Roger Horwitz waged for nearly twenty months until Horwitz succumbed at age forty-four. The New York Times Book Review praised: 'Monette has etched a magnificent monument to his lover's bravery, their commitment to each other and the plague of hatred and ignorance they had to endure.'
'Love Alone', also published to great acclaim in 1988, comprises a cycle of eighteen poems written during the first five months after Howitz's death; in Monette's words, this book marks 'one man's passing and one man's cry, a warrior burying a warrior.' Andrew Holleran called the poems 'scathing, caustic, brilliant. As sad and savage as the plague itself.' Judy Grahn said, 'Magnificent and deeply moving. This is real poetry of real love, real death in real life.'
Winner of the 1992 National Book Award for Nonfiction, 'Becoming a Man' is a breathtakingly honest and eloquent memoir of Monette's growing up gay in the '50s and struggling to break free of 'the closet' and come out. It concludes with his meeting of Roger Horwitz. As L.A. Weekly noted, this memoir is 'one of the most complex, moral, personal, and political books to have been written about gay life.' Hailed Booklist: 'Maybe one of the great American biographies.' And The Advocate praised, 'A deep, clear lake of recollection...Stands as a talisman for the millions of queer lives it so clearly parallels.'