Love and Other Infectious Diseases: A Memoir

Andrew Sarris, Columbia University film teacher and Village Voice film critic, was suddenly, horribly afflicted by a mysterious sickness in June of 1984. The symptoms included high fever, hallucinations and partial paralysis; only after a long hospitalization was the malady diagnosed as CMV (cytomegalovirus). To the author, his wife, the ordeal interrupted and nearly destroyed ``our supposedly glamorous and exciting lives as married movie reviewers.'' In her funny, wise and affectingly human memoir, Haskell ( From Reverence to Rape ) takes us into the labyrinths of New York Hospital and through her months of fear and uncertainty. With charm, modesty and force she captures the pain and impotence of the caring bystander whose suffering is acute, and who finds the valor and unconditional love to sustain her through what becomes a four-year comedy of terrors. But this is not the story of an illness as much as it is an anatomy of the love shared by a proper Southern lady and a disheveled Greek from Queens--a remarkable tale of growth and recovery, the ``reshuffling of the atoms of self.'' (Apr . )