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| Category: Memoir |
(requires Adobe Reader)
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| About the Book | |
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LOSING TIME, a memoir, offers a frank account of gay life as I lived it in Sacramento, CA during the AIDS crisis--the Losing Time of the title. It focuses on the later life and too early death from AIDS of one man among the many remembered here--Dore Tanner (1949-98)--who taught me in that dark era that love was more than the heterosexual illusion I had always believed it to be. LOSING TIME offers an honest, sometimes humorous, depiction of two gay men who blundered into a love neither of us was looking for, and subsequently, the fat grief felt on so soon losing a lover so lately found and the determination it took to find my way again when my compass pointed only south. This memoir's interweaving of the account of a particular loss with the stories of so many others who lost time entirely in the AIDS era presents the texture of life as many gay men lived it during the Losing Time, which began nearly 40 years ago. The book's focus on personal experience particularizes an AIDS history fast becoming generalized, its human details being lost to memory.
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| Reviews | |
"I was hooked from the first sentence. Your prose style is brilliant, witty, charming....You have a powerful story to tell, and you write so beautifully." "When I picked up LOSING TIME: AIDS LESSONS IN LOVE AND LOSS, the reader in me prepared to savor a gay love story, but the judge in me wondered how this topic could be made fresh. Though Agosta's account covers well-trodden ground in that it centers on a white middle-class couple in the 1990s, its power and uniqueness reside in how vividly the author reconstructs day-to-day life with a terminally ill lover. Poetically written and rich with physical detail, the story was well-structured, with a wide emotional range that included humor and aesthetic pleasure as well as the indignities of illness. A colorful cast of family, friends, and caregivers accompanied the author through his lover's final years. At times I felt the poetic writing became too flowery, layering on too many similes when a simple description would have sufficed. One might think it incongruous to call this tragic story "a pleasure to read," but the talent for finding beauty in fleeting and even painful moments is a gift from the gay culture of Agosta's generation, which he has shared with us in LOSING TIME."
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| About the Author | |
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Lucien L. Agosta, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English Literature at California State University, Sacramento, has published numerous articles in his field, as well as two books: HOWARD PYLE (G. K. Hall, 1987) and E. B. WHITE: THE CHILDREN'S BOOKS (Simon & Schuster, 1995). He is married to Bud Sydenstricker and now resides in Palm Springs, CA. |