Love and Other Infectious Diseases

Book excerpt: My husband awoke one night with a fever of 105.9. I rushed him to the Emergency room of a New York hospital, and there began a six month drama in which doctors tried to figure out what was wrong with him, while I alternated between hope and despair. For the three months that Andrew remained critically ill and deranged, hallucinating most of the time, he was no longer the lover, friend, fellow critic and confidant I was used to. Eleven years my senior, Andrew had been my mentor as a writer and established film critic, and now I might be on my own. Terrified by the possibility of Andrew's death and forced by that terror to look inward, I began to see the extent of my dependency on a marriage that had seemed perfectly equal, perfect in fact. I think of the book as both a thriller and love story: a hospital suspense melodrama as it tracks the ups and downs of a husband's illness, and the memoir of a marriage that focuses on my own spiritual and psychological journey.