Bodil Sjöström’s Där kärlek sker: Om hiv, aids och vännerna vi förlorade (“Where There Is Love: HIV, AIDS and the Friends We Lost”) ended up on my to-read list after I read a review of it in Historiskan. Part of it was the positive review itself, part of it was my own dawning realization (especially in face of the backlash we’re seeing against queer people) that I didn’t know as much queer history as I should, and part of it was the thought that it would be an excellent gift for a queer HIV-positive friend who had a birthday in October. And since I refuse to give away a book as a gift without having read it myself, I suddenly had a deadline and a reason to actually prioritize this book out of the 700 other books on my TBR.
I was expecting Där kärlek sker to be denser, in a way; the chapters are fairly short and Sjöström keeps things very conversational. And as if to challenge my previous observations about the achronological nature of memoirs I’ve seen recently published, Sjöström adheres more or less to a timeline. She alternates a brief history of AIDS with personal testimony from people who lost loved ones to AIDS or who otherwise were involved with AIDS activism during the 80s and 90s, which leads to a nice balance. Historical events don’t happen in a vacuum, after all; they happen to people.
It was an informative book and one that filled an important gap in my knowledge; the only other book I’ve read about AIDS, I realized after I finished, was Ryan White: My Own Story, which I read for a class assignment in middle school. My understanding could use a little updating.
Unfortunately, the self-imposed birthday deadline turned out to be completely irrelevant. The same friend I intended to gift this book took their own life just a week and half before their birthday, so now it can linger in my own library a while as a memento. No English translation is currently available, either, but if you can read Swedish I would recommend picking it up.
