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I read “My Own Country” by Abraham Verghese one year ago and it changed the way I look at doctors, patients, families of patients, homosexuals, AIDS victims and the world before and during the AIDS epidemic. This book is an autobiographical about a doctor that was a pioneer in the treatment of AIDS in the 80’s. With each patient he encounters there is a genuine care for that patient and yet also a fear of him or her. The setting is in a time when AIDS was a new disease and even though the knowledge was there of how it was spread, fear came upon the world as people with HIV appeared in the workplace, at school, in churches, in families. Demeanor changed at the first notion of an acquaintance having HIV. The world never was the same.
“My Own Country” does a fantastic job of creating characters that the reader comes to love. You hope for a cure that you know didn’t come. You see their gruesome deaths. And you cry whether the family cries with you or not. Verghese can do this because he had intimate relationships with many of these patients. He came to know who they were, where they came from. He shared many of their fears, and watched them in their pain. While writing this story, it was no doubt an emotional experience for this brilliant writer.

The writer, who is also the main character in the story, is not ashamed to tell everything behind the scenes, down to his own stereotypes, awkward sexual confusions, the crumbling of his marriage, and how he himself changed from his first occurrence with AIDS until the end of the book. This allows the reader to come to a wider understanding of how this experience changed the writer. The reader doesn’t get just a surface description of the main character but a deep and thorough feel for who this character is and who he became.

Abraham Verghese has his first encounter with AIDS as a resident in a large metropolitan area in the north. By this time AIDS was becoming a common occurrence in the big cities, but when he moved to a small city in Tennessee AIDS and the effects of AIDS on the community became a completely different experience. Southern discrimination was at its worst but this time it wasn’t confined to a race. In fact completely different problems arose. For example, when a prominent business man in a small city is diagnosed with HIV after a blood transfusion he lies to his whole family in order to protect them from discrimination or from jumping to conclusions. Homosexuality was the first conclusion many people came to when HIV was mentioned. For a man such as this the fear of discrimination caused him and his wife to die a long a painful death alone.

This book will not only educate you on the dangers of HIV and AIDS but it will change your outlook on the world. You will not be the same after this book.