The Great Believers

Oh, this book.

THIS BOOK.

I think I'll look back at the end of the year and feel even more strongly about The Great Believers than I do right now. And, I feel pretty dang strongly about it now.

It's about hope and death and love and family and war and friendship and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. It's about Chicago's Boystown and 1920's Paris and the love that stays with you, long after the person is gone.

It's about the burden of memory. And, the gift of memory, too.

Yale is a gay man in Chicago in the mid-1980s. The gay community there was like a battlefield, with the "new" disease AIDS picking off men, one by one. Yale watches slowly as men around him become infected and die, always suspecting the same disease might come for him.

Fiona's brother Nico is one of Yale's closest friends. Nico dies early on and Fiona is the one who takes care of them all and really tries to hold the whole community together. 

Chapters alternate between the 1980s and 2015. In the future timeline, Fiona is in Paris trying to track down her daughter, who once joined a cult and has cut off ties with her parents. What Fiona finds in Paris is far beyond what she was looking for. She's also confronted with the memories of those times in the 80's and all the men she lost.

In the middle of all of this, there's the story of an old woman dedicated to paying tribute to a man she love and lost 70 years before. An artist, who because of war, never got his due. Her story ties so closely together with Fiona and Yale. The burden of how we honor those we've left behind.

This book is long and, at first, felt a little slow. But, about a quarter of the way in, I was enveloped by the characters and the story. By the time I reached the final chapters this morning, I simply could not stop reading it. In fact, I sacrificed a good hair day because I read as a curled my hair. When I reached the last two pages, I stopped what I was doing and went to my bed to finish it. I needed to be wrapped up when I saw how it all ended. 

Yeah, that good.

That quote above comes late in the novel, as a character Fiona hadn't seen in decades finally reunites with her. He relates what they've been through to Horatio in Hamlet - the only character who lives to tell their stories. The burden of memory. I had never heard it that way. It's devastatingly beautiful.

I read in the afterword that the author wanted to write this book because not enough has been written about AIDS in Chicago. It's the third largest city, so many men died. Someone needed to tell their story. I'm so glad it was done in such a beautiful way.

Despite the apparent death sentence, the men in this book are somehow still hopeful. They care for each other as, one by one, they fall away. The parallel to the old woman telling stories of losing men in World War I was subtle and heartbreaking. 

There's so much here. So much that will stay with me. 

As I write this, I've just found out that Amy Poehler has optioned this book for a 

TV project. I can imagine it being told beautifully, richly - and by one of my favorite people! But, I do believe (no pun intended) that it should be read first.