title: The truth about writing/writing about the truth.
abstract: SUMMARY The essay examines how one writer turns her life experience into fiction, and explores the question so often asked of fiction writers, "Is that story really true?" Author Lesléa Newman uses her own work to show how the experience of losing her good friend, the poet Gerard Rizza, to AIDS, translated into a short story, a children's book and a novel told in fifty poems. Each form tells a different sort of truth about the experience the author went through in her process of assimilating her grief into her life and her work.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Newman
keywords: AIDS; Self-writing; death and dying; gay men; lesbians