Goodbye, I Love You, by Carol Lynn Pearson

I found this memoir far less compelling than I expected; having dated and madly loved a gay man for some time myself, I anticipated being heavily involved, emotionally, and in fact had avoiding reading this for that reason--why would I subject myself to heartbreak all over again?

Instead, though, I found that this book depicted, gracefully and deeply, Carol Lynn's pain, but didn't touch my own. Whether that's because Carol Lynn and I are so different, or whether it's because Gerald and my gay man were so different, or whether it's because of a flaw in the book's style or presentation, I couldn't say. (I suspect, though, that a lot of it has to do with the differing personalities; in spite of Carol Lynn's obvious love for Gerald, I found him rather unsympathic. Not to say, of course, that he deserved anything he got, just that I couldn't quite empathize with Carol Lynn's decisions to stay with him and support him and nurse him. Basically, I didn't share the adoration.) In the end, though, this was a well-written and interesting book which stopped somewhere short of "moving." In fact, the scenes I found most personally touching were those related to the LDS Church: when Gerald is dying and Carol Lynn is taking care of him, the local ward is mobilized to help her. CL writes, "people who won't even drink coffee have a hard time understanding homosexuality and AIDS, but they don't have a hard time understanding suffering and need. Mormons have been trained to deal with disaster since pioneer days. They can mobilize a hundred wards to get out the sand bags against a flood in half an hour. And where other floods happen, private floods that leave you adrift, they can get there in a hurry too." Generally, the issues of Mormonism and homosexuality leave me slightly confused and depressed, but this passage, more than anything else I've read or felt recently, made me proud to be a Mormon. May such active mercy continue in wards around the world.