cover image AIDS Memoir: Journal of an HIV-Positive Mother

AIDS Memoir: Journal of an HIV-Positive Mother

Catherine Wyatt-Morley. Kumarian, $17.95 (194pp) ISBN 978-1-56549-067-3

After a hysterectomy in 1994, Wyatt-Morley was told that she had tested positive for HIV. A faithful wife of more than 10 years, and not a drug user, she had never before considered having herself tested. Her husband also tested positive; it was likely an affair of his that provided the opening for the ""invasion of the enemy"" of HIV into their lives. Reeling from the shock, Wyatt-Morley began negotiating the long, hard road of coping with insensitive and undereducated doctors, the double discrimination of being a black woman with HIV, fear of family disgrace, her husband's alcoholism, their rapidly deteriorating marriage and a variety of physical ailments. Told in diary format, this riveting story of one woman's journey through HIV infection is a roller-coaster ride of anger and faith, despair and hope, fear and, above all, love--a mother's love for the children whom she knows she will leave before they are grown, and the love of women who came together to help one another through the shared ordeal of living with HIV and AIDS. Since her diagnosis, Wyatt-Morley has founded a support and education group for women, spoken to health-care professionals and the public about HIV and AIDS and has made a video documenting women's experiences with the disease. Her diary offers a great deal of medical and political information about HIV and AIDS--with which, she says, ""all humankind is either infected or affected."" (July)