Paula W. Peterson found out she had AIDS eight years ago in the months following a very happy event, the birth of her child.
The 43-year-old Evanston native experienced a string of odd health problems–a long, drawn-out case of sinusitis, weight loss, fevers, headaches and a terrible fatigue.
Because she is white, middle class, well-educated and married, AIDS was the last thing that doctors suspected. They speculated that her problems were related to postpartum depression.
It was an enormous shock to them as well as to Peterson when tests showed she had full-blown AIDS. Peterson was frightened for her husband and her son, whom she had been nursing. They were tested and did not have HIV, the virus that is designated AIDS in its later stages.
Peterson fell into a depression.
“I thought I was going to die in a few months,” she said. “I was terrified and I wanted to write down this experience for my son. She wrote an essay, “Prognosis Guarded.”
She later rewrote that essay in a less “therapeutic” form and wrote other essays and an autobiographical letter to her son. These pieces were published in 2001 as the memoir “Penitent, with Roses: An HIV+ Mother Reflects” (University Press of New England). It won the Bakeless Prize for non-fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Peterson continued to explore the experience of HIV/AIDS in the recently published “Women in the Grove” (Beacon Press), a collection of nine short stories about women living with HIV/AIDS.
It is part of what is so far a rather small body of literature about women with HIV, in contrast with the outpouring of work by gay men, who were hit hard in the earlier days of the AIDS epidemic.
In “Cherry’s Ghost,” a woman battles the specter of her ex-husband who torments her every night. In “Camille,” a woman struggles to stay clean and sober, hang on to her job, cajole her young, HIV-positive daughter to take her daily pills, and tell her sweet-talking new boyfriend about her own HIV status.
In “A Miracle,” Lucinda, a woman with end-stage AIDS, sees a vision of God, pronounces herself cured and reinvents her life.
Only one of the stories is told from the point of view of a man, a doctor who encounters “The Woman in the Long Green Coat,” also the story’s title. He gave the woman, Olga, her diagnosis of AIDS and treated her. In the process she bewitched him by interpreting his dreams, as a sort of scheme to seduce him emotionally to get money to return to her native Russia. Peterson’s stories are informed by the women she met since her HIV diagnosis, although she stresses that they are purely works of imagination.
She joined a support group of mothers with HIV and she became an activist. She told her story to youth groups, lobbied for more research funding and worked on a hot line sponsored by the AIDS Foundation in San Francisco, where she and her family were living.
“I was influenced by a lot of things I heard [in the support group], by the flavor of the women’s voices, their speech patterns and backgrounds. I was very moved by everything I heard, everything that was experienced. I met a lot of women elsewhere too.
“I encountered women who had overcome drug problems, who had lived on the streets, spent time in jail. They were struggling against all sorts of things, not just HIV.”
It was Peterson’s ability to capture their voices that Beacon Press publisher Helene Atwan found so compelling about these short stories.
“If you were telling [such] stories in a non-fiction way, you couldn’t make the readers really feel the impact, make them enter the lives of these women in the way that Paula does in these stories,” Atwan said.
Among the women with HIV/AIDS who inspired her short stories, Peterson considered herself an anomaly.
“I was married, white, middle class and educated. I didn’t fit the demographic,” she said. “I didn’t think of myself [as] at-risk. I never assumed for a minute that anything I had done in my past would endanger my health.”
Peterson said she was infected during a “very casual relationship” in the 1980s.
At the time she had developed some “strange symptoms,” including a full-body rash, that doctors could not diagnose and dismissed because they went away and she was otherwise in good health.
She believes her body harbored the virus for about 18 years.
Now, she considers herself “one of the lucky ones.” Although she had “wasting illness” and lost a lot of weight just prior to being diagnosed, she never has been hospitalized with any serious AIDS-related opportunistic infections. The anti-retroviral medications, five pills each morning, do not cause many side effects, and she is able to manage AIDS as a chronic illness.
She is dark-haired with large gray-green eyes and the quiet manner of a woman who immerses herself in the solitary act of writing.
Late at night or when her son is in school, Peterson writes in the airy, vintage apartment she shares with her family near the lakefront in southeast Evanston.
Writing has always been a part of her life. She graduated from Brandeis University with a degree in English and began work toward a doctorate in English at the University of Michigan, intending to teach. Instead she decided to focus on writing.
She published a few articles and short stories. She also has two unpublished novels under her belt. She credits her mother for prompting her to write the stories in “Women in the Grove.” After writing the memoir, she said she enjoyed writing about people who were so different from her.
Peterson thinks she is probably finished writing about HIV, at least overtly. She tries her best to put AIDS aside and concentrate on her family and writing fiction.
“I’m writing a lot about love, middle age and relationships, those are the themes cropping up in my work,” she said.
“People who are gravely ill sometimes crop up, but it’s not the main thrust. I think illness will always play some role in my fiction.”
