Marion Winik — First Comes Love: A Memoir (30th Anniversary Edition)
Marion Winik revisits her landmark AIDS-era memoir about love, loss, and grief on its 30th anniversary, in conversation with novelist Susan Coll.
Why we picked this
First Comes Love was a landmark of the AIDS memoir genre when it appeared. Thirty years later, Winik revisits it — an unusual chance to hear a writer reckon with a formative book across a span of decades.
Marion Winik’s First Comes Love was published in 1996 and became one of the defining personal accounts of the AIDS crisis — a book about loving and losing a husband to the disease at a time when the epidemic was still reshaping American life. The 30th anniversary edition brings the book back into print with Winik’s reflection on what it meant to write it, and what it means now.
Winik is a longtime essayist and memoirist, a regular contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered, and a writing teacher with a distinctive voice — personal, precise, and unwilling to sentimentalize even the most painful material. She and novelist Susan Coll will discuss how the book has aged, what the AIDS crisis looks like in retrospect, and what it costs to put a life this raw into print.
This is the kind of anniversary event that has real substance: the book was genuinely significant, and the conversation about it now — 30 years out, in a very different cultural moment — promises to be honest about what was gained and what was lost.