PORTLAND, Maine — When Melanie Brooks’ father died, her family was overcome by grief. Her eighteen-year-old brother whispered in her ear, “I’m too young not to have a dad.” She knew exactly how he felt. She was twenty-three, too young not to have a dad.
In “A Hard Silence,” her new memoir, Brooks tells the story of how she and her family tried to deal—and not deal—with her father’s illness and death. His struggles began in the mid-1980s when he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion while undergoing heart surgery. There was, at the time, no cure.
All too aware of the shame and stigma associated with AIDS, which was then viewed by many as a disease meant to punish gay men and intravenous drug users, Brooks’ family kept her father’s illness a secret for ten years until his death. Decades would go by before she realized what a painful emotional toll that silence had taken on her.
“I adored my dad. He was a larger-than-life personality,” Brooks says. “For ten years I watched him kind of fade beneath the weight and stigma of this disease. Then the deep grief of that loss, I carried with me.”
As a teacher and writer in New Hampshire, Brooks has guided students through the challenges of crafting a candid memoir and even wrote a book on the subject called “Writing Hard Stories.” And yet, she needed nearly thirty years to open up about her journey and tell her own hard story.
“It took me a long time to realize. … this was something I could talk about,” she says. “I think I had to come to a place where I was really ready to dig into those memories and those experiences.”