Hospital Time

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by Amy Hoffman,

Foreword by Urvashi Vaid

Duke University Press

Due/Published April 1997, 168 pages, paper

ISBN 0822319209

Dorothy Allison said it right when she said, "Hospital Time is necessary, powerful, full of the detail of authentic struggle, and beautifully done. Hoffman is right out there naked in real life with all her convictions and the full sense of her community. Her book is a revelation." Sure, it's a blurb for a book, but it's exactly right. Amy Hoffman takes you directly to the heart of the matter, and the matter is what it feels like to be responsible for a friend who is dying, a difficult friend who is dying of AIDS. Hoffman, a writer, lesbian activist, and former editor of Gay Community News, was primary caregiver to Mike Riegle, the friend who died in 1992. Neither idealizing nor deifying him, Hoffman is remarkably open in exploring her own conflicting feelings and in describing how the experience of being involved with Riegle's struggle and eventual death echoed throughout her own life and altered her relationships with family, friends, even strangers. She gives voice to the psychological and emotional havoc AIDS creates for those in the difficult role of caring for the terminally ill.