THE VERY HEART OF IT

A celebrated historical novelist shares his diary entries.

Culled from copious handwritten notebooks, Mallon’s moving, bittersweet epistolary memoir begins in the fall of 1983, when the author was 32 and an English professor at Vassar College. Writing novels seemed a more exciting career transition, however, so the author relocated to New York City. But as his missives incrementally chronicle, these were also the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when the queer community slowly became decimated by an invisible threat no one saw coming. Dreadfully aware of his own viral vulnerability, Mallon confesses, “We’ve all been exposed, we’re all living under the sword, & I’m no more lethal than anyone else. We’re either going to get it or not.” As his journal entries become less optimistic, Mallon observes regulars disappearing from the Saturday night gay Catholic Masses he attends, along with men in their 20s and 30s stricken with facial Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. As his professional writing career flourished, the decimation continued. To salvage some semblance of normalcy and happiness, he sought out the kind of “extravagant love” found in more awkward, reserved men, while carefully entertaining casual sexual affairs in such a way as to “put me (probably) in no physical danger, just more psychological peril.” Despite Mallon’s conversational prose, the anxiety over how inevitable getting sick felt is palpable throughout these entries (“my AIDS fears travel everywhere with me”), but all are leavened with pauses of levity as when he writes rapturously about Manhattan life (and its rats), his brilliantly observed social foibles, or his humorous exasperation when overthinking a cough until the ’90s offered relief. This time capsule profiles the queer community’s immense struggle to survive against the nearly insurmountable odds of AIDS and weaponized politics, while concurrently fighting for social justice and equal rights. The many human moments (funny, sad, witty, horrible, and beautiful) populating Mallon’s diaries collectively (and vicariously) illuminate a supremely resilient community that soldiered on (and kept dancing) despite insurmountable loss and pain.

An exquisitely evocative glimpse into an unparalleled era in queer history steeped in joy, sex, and death.