Reading · Martha Anne Toll's Newsletter

I’m normally on deadline for a book review or an article, but books related to those projects are never exclusively what I’m reading.

My TBR [“to be read”] pile looks random, even to me. I never know why I select a book to read at a particular moment. I often don’t remember why I borrowed it from the library or purchased it, beyond that gold standard: somebody-I-trust-recommended-it.

Below is one of my many TBR piles, but not really, because I’ve actually read a number of these books and written about others in this stack. No one ever accused me of stashing books in a recognizable order.

Nevertheless, I’ve learned to trust my choice-of-reading brain because it tends to operate ahead of, and in service to my writing brain.

This week, I read my first Rebecca Makkai novel, THE GREAT BELIEVERS. What a fantastic piece of writing. Reading it was a bolt of inspiration.

One part of the novel is set in Chicago, in the mid 1980s, in the heart of the AIDS epidemic; the other in 2015. One protagonist is Yale Tishman, a gay man living in Boystown in Chicago. The other is Fiona Marcus, whose brother dies from AIDS at the outset. Yale lives within a young and sick and dying community, and Fiona bears witness and cares for her brother’s community. Friendships run deep, with all the conflicts that entails. The characters face their mortality differently and with humor, while fighting to live in the present.

All around them, beautiful boys are dying horrendous deaths. The Reagan Administration ignores them, or hides from them, or pillories them. A fatal epidemic wipes out a generation of young men (and women) finding their place in the world, and a generation of older men coming out of the shadows, trying to live their lives.

I came of age during the AIDS epidemic. I remember parents denying their children, the community struggling to support and keep these abandoned boys from dying alone. Friends, including many musicians, colleagues, and heroes died and kept dying. The AIDS quilt—each panel signifying an un-fillable hole in a family’s or a friend’s or a lover’s life, traveled to Washington every year, growing geometrically, or so it seemed.

It took years for me to get anything down, but here is a short fiction piece, loosely inspired by my cherished office mate in my first job out of college. He was an early AIDS casualty.

Makkai is too young to remember the AIDS epidemic. Therein lies the strength of her novel. Her view from inside feels more like reportage than fiction. It is nuanced and empathic and clever and real. She captures the moment. Rather than writing a requiem, she breathes life into a community decimated by loss.

Here’s Makkai’s TBR list when the New York Times interviewed her a few years ago.

How do you make your book choices? I’d love to know.

I’m heading up to Maine soon and anticipating my Maine face (below).