The Observable Universe

January 22, 2024
Visual and performance artist McCalden grapples in her singular debut memoir with the void left by her parents’ deaths from AIDS as well as her own struggle to extract meaning from the tragedy. McCalden’s parents died in the early 1990s, when she was 10 years old. As an adult haunted both by her parents’ physical absence and by how little she knew about them, McCalden turned first to the internet and then to a private investigator to fill in the gaps. Short, kaleidoscopic passages flit from virological science gleaned from medical journals to the development of online networks, with musings on noir, McCalden’s hometown of Los Angeles, and snippets of personal history woven in along the way. Throughout, McCalden writes movingly about her disjointed upbringing—first with her parents, then with her grandmother— and draws astute parallels as the dawn of the internet converges with the peak of AIDS: “The virus is a condition of being human.... We’ve moved online, the viruses have followed.” By the final pages, however, that thread frays into perfunctory social media critique, which registers as a placeholder for the sparse amount of information McCalden is able to dig up about her parents. Still, this nebulous volume movingly illustrates the fragmentary experience of grief.

February 1, 2024
An examination of grief and viruses through the AIDS crisis and the internet age. In the early 1990s, McCalden, a multidisciplinary artist, lost both her parents to "AIDS-related complications." Her grandmother, Nivia, raised her, removing her parents' few belongings from their home. The author's life has been marked by their absence and what little she knows about them. This book is a reckoning with grief and the unknown, but it's equally about the virus, which McCalden calls her "closest living relative." Interspersed with her story and the history of the disease is a fascinating line of research on the early internet era, connected thematically by computer "viruses" and its overlapping timeline with the AIDS crisis. The mid-1990s, writes the author, represent a gap in the archive, when paper filing was quickly becoming obsolete and the internet was still new. As a result, only the oldest, most fragile documents were preserved in the digital realm, leaving the ephemera of daily life to memory or imagination. In short vignettes varying widely in topics and tone, McCalden encourages readers to see her book as an album about grief. "Every fragment is like a track on a record, a picture in a yearbook; they build on top of one another until, at the end, they form an experience," she writes. While often captivating, the fragmented style eventually wears thin and often fails to lead to greater insights. The parceling of information is reminiscent of the internet, but, like the internet, the information is diluted from its source. Some moments are truly translucent in their brilliance--e.g., McCalden's claim that "observation is a relationship"--but readers may seek more depth. Nonetheless, there's plenty to appreciate in the strength of the prose and the unexpected connections. Fans of experimental form will find much to admire here.

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February 15, 2024
McCalden's analytic and heartfelt memoir interweaves meditations on personal loss with deep dives into internet culture and the AIDS epidemic, providing an innovative reflection on the elusive nature of grief. Mourning the loss of both parents to AIDS, McCalden traces linguistic, cultural, and temporal similarities between two seemingly disconnected narratives: the development of the internet, from search engines to social media, and the spread of AIDS, including HIV research and its treatments. Leaving no stone unturned in this story of parallels, she meticulously highlights how the metaphoric language surrounding viruses permeates both the computer and medical worlds, eliciting thought-provoking questions about how metaphors shape worldviews and create intimacies. McCalden's memoir also includes notable moments where media communication becomes literary forms, such as using dialogue to depict voice memos, creating a stimulating digitalized reading experience. McCalden's journalistic tone, focused on key dates, definitions, and events, opens alternative avenues for articulating grief (particularly as her research uncovers one parent's troubling history) and allows readers to encounter Instagram and its contemporaries in a refreshingly historical framework.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.