The Lives We Remember

But I had arrived in San Francisco in the midst of the AIDS epidemic.

I was reminded of those years recently when I asked my Manhattanite daughter to name her favorite Broadway shows. To my surprise, Rent was on her list. It happens to be my favorite, too. Since then, YouTube has been serving me clips of Rent performances, and each one seems to pull me back to that time.

So does driving through San Francisco. I often pass the building where I spent my first three years after college, and I think about the people I worked with and the places where we gathered for drinks after work. Eddie Rickenbacker’s. The Fly Trap. Some of those places are gone now, or exist only as remnants of the San Francisco I remember.

Publishing attracted creative, interesting, liberal-minded people, and many of my colleagues were gay men. Gradually, I watched some of them become thinner. Then sicker. And then they stopped coming to work.

That progression is one of the clearest memories I have of those years. HIV infections. AIDS diagnoses. Fear. Funerals. Activism. And the terrible uncertainty surrounding a disease that was taking the lives of people who should have had decades ahead of them.

I read everything Armistead Maupin wrote. His Tales of the City books chronicled the San Francisco I knew—or at least one vibrant, funny, unconventional corner of it. His characters lived in a city where gay and straight lives intertwined naturally, friendships became families, and enormous social changes were unfolding alongside the ordinary business of falling in love, going to work, and figuring out who you were.

Years later, another epidemic would change my life.

The Memoir Writer grew in part from the losses of the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID made the fragility of memory impossible for me to ignore. People were dying, sometimes unexpectedly, and with them disappeared stories that no one had thought to write down.

But when I think about why preserving people's stories matters so much to me, I realize that feeling began much earlier.

The AIDS epidemic affected me just as profoundly.

I had already learned, in my twenties, how quickly someone could disappear from your everyday life. When a person dies, we don't lose only that person. We risk losing their stories: the ridiculous things they did when they were young, the places they loved, the people who changed them, the mistakes they made, the jokes they told, the work they were proud of, and the small moments no obituary could ever capture.

Perhaps that is part of why Rent still moves me so deeply. Its most famous question is how we measure a life. I think we measure it, at least partly, in the stories we leave behind. And that is why I do what I do.