To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

After being diagnosed with AIDS, photographer and writer Hervé Guibert wrote the devastating and personal To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, chronicling three months in the penultimate year of the narrator's life. In the wake of his friend Muzil's death, he goes from one quack doctor to another, from dark optimism to despair, as the American friend who promises to get him on a drug trial fails to deliver and his own body begins to insist on its mortality. On publication in 1990, the novel scandalized the French media, which quickly identified Muzil as Guibert's close friend Michel Foucault. To the Friend became a bestseller, and Guibert a celebrity. The book has since attained a cult following for its tender, fragmented, blackly funny and beautifully written accounts of illness, friendship, art and everyday life. As well as illuminating the historic peak of the AIDS crisis, Guibert reflects on that 'borderline of uncertainty, so familiar to all sick people everywhere'. In his struggle to piece together a language suited to his suffering, Hervé Guibert catapulted himself into notoriety and sealed his reputation as a writer of shocking precision and power.