Poignant and affectionate, Geography of the Heart is a moving portrait of Lambda Award winner Fenton Johnson, the son of a Kentucky whiskey brewer, and his fateful lover Larry Rose, who, three years into their intense relationship, died of AIDS.
Rose had been upfront about his condition from the start of his relationship with Johnson, and the knowledge left their interactions fraught with the pain of anticipated loss. Though Johnson never contracted the virus himself, Roseβs physical decline haunted him. He had come to depend on Rose for his care and understanding as much as Rose, increasingly fragile as their relationship progresses, depended on him.
The vivid, poignant, and wise tribute to his soulmate that Johnson has distilled into The Geography of the Heart is a memoir like no other, a startling story of compassion, perseverance, and the acute wounds that can linger in the shadow of true love. **
Amazon.com Review
In 1990, Larry Rose, the partner of novelist Fenton Johnson, died of complications from AIDS. In Geography of the Heart , Fenton, author of Scissors, Paper, Rock , Songs of the Soil , and Crossing the River , honors Rose with a beautifully written memoir. Alternating between his own story and Rose's as far back as childhood, Johnson fashions a moving portrait of the man who was "a teacher, [who] taught me how to love."
From Publishers Weekly
Novelist Johnson (Scissors, Paper, Rock) watched his lover, San Francisco high-school teacher Larry Rose, die of AIDS in a Paris hospital in 1990 after an intense three-year relationship. Rose was HIV-positive but asymptomatic when they met, and while their lovemaking was haunted by fear of contagion, the author remains HIV-negative. Rose, the only child of German Jewish Holocaust survivors?his father, Leo, was imprisoned and beaten by the Nazis in Holland, escaped and hid for three years with broken vertebrae?had a very different background from that of Johnson, who grew up Catholic and the youngest of nine in an isolated Appalachian town in Kentucky. Johnson writes with crystal clarity of his gradual acceptance by his lover's emigrant parents, of coming out to his own widowed mother at 31, of Rose's gradual physical deterioration and of his working through grief toward emotional renewal. This is a remarkable memoir, touching, funny, searing, eloquent, beautifully alive.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.