![]() ![]() Tim met John Caleo in the mid seventies at their Melbourne high school. But the imminent death that underscores every sentence of this memoir isn’t nearly as important as the raw romance and the relentless candour Tim portrays it with that established this book as an Australian classic. Tim himself died of the same disease not long after he had finished the manuscript, before it had been published. This isn’t a spoiler it’s well known that John passes away at the end of the memoir, and it’s even implicated in the blurb. He’s in Italy writing a letter addressed to his partner of fifteen years, John, who died of AIDs a few months prior. I’ve just translated the last line of Timothy Conigrave’s memoir, Holding the Man, written in 1995. We sit quietly together, both temporarily out-of-order. Tears fall onto my keyboard and make a little salty moat around my spacebar, which refuses to work for an hour or so afterwards. The screen wavers in blurred, watery streaks. The language is automatically detected as Italian, and the translation begins: we will see each other… Sadness is caught like a fishbone in my throat. Originally published in Good Reading Magazine October 2015. A piece I wrote about Tim Conigrave’s memoir, Holding the Man, on the 20th anniversary of its publication, and in light of its recent film adaption by Neil Armfield. ![]()
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