In the Shadow of the Bridge: A Memoir

This tender memoir by playwright and novelist Caldwell (The Pig Trilogy) opens with a sexually charged meeting on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1959 between Caldwell and photographer William Gale Gedney. After they had a brief relationship, Gedney became Caldwell’s quiet obsession for three decades, during which he maintains “an exile’s yearning for a return that would never be allowed.” Caldwell recounts an austere Milwaukee childhood, moving to New York, and reconciling his homosexuality with his Catholicism. (“I could not not be a Catholic anymore than I could not be of Irish ancestry, or than I could not be a male of the human species.”) Caldwell fondly shares his successes, such as winning the Rome Prize for literature in 1978 and his residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo writers’ colonies. During the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, Caldwell became a volunteer at St. Vincent’s Hospital, working as a one-on-one caregiver. But even this experience couldn’t prepare him for rekindling his friendship with Gedney, who had AIDS. For the next few months, Caldwell became Gedney’s live-in caretaker, while managing his ongoing affection for his dying friend. “What I had probably half hoped for was some degree of renewal of our emotional intimacy,” Caldwell writes. His story of love and loss is told with earnestness and wit. (Nov.)