Writing Hard Stories

 

Fascinating read about what an author feels when writing about their most traumatic events in their lives and how a memoir becomes a life of it's own.

Melanie Brooks is a writer and a teacher.

Her father died of AIDs - In the mid 1980s, Canada’s worst public health disaster was unfolding. Catastrophic mismanagement of the country’s blood supply allowed contaminated blood to be knowingly distributed nationwide, infecting close to two thousand Canadians with HIV. Among them was Melanie Brooks’s surgeon father who, after receiving a blood transfusion during open-heart surgery in 1985, learned he was HIV positive.