Review - Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story by Frederik Peeters
April 9th, 2008 John Posted in Comic Books, Reviews |
Swiss artist Frederik Peeters has made a strong American debut with “Blue Pills,” his memoir of romance and HIV that skirts between stark honesty and illusory metaphors. In the book, Peeters fall for Cati, a girl he knew as a teenager in a distant way, but finally connects with in a close and unexpected one.
Peeters runs into Cati on and off through the years — he has one anecdote from the teenage years that is etched in his memory, an story that paints him as lonely, her as unattainable. As the years pass, it begins to seem that things haven’t gone right for her, that some of her glow has dulled through the grit of life — and like him in the story he tells, a little on the outside. Their encounter at a party seems to revive that spark in her — or at least revives his vision of the spark — and they ease into a bond that seems so natural, so simple, that it’s astonishing that it never clicked before. But everything has its time and the person that Cati is now is shaped by many things that are different, most notably her HIV and her son, with whom she shares the virus.
HIV is the strangest of dividers, an invisible signpost that most people don’t even know how to define. AIDS itself carries with it a particular kind of baggage that many still equate with being gay, being promiscuous, still mix up with their own perceptions and morality. More than any other disease in recent memory, there’s nothing so much like AIDS to bring out a “they deserve what they get” sort of contempt in some people. By way of differentiation, HIV is the virus that can lead to AIDS, which is the actual breakdown of your immune system. It is spread through normal human activity, most notably sex but also — frighteningly — from mother to child through birth and possibly even breast feeding.
In Peeters memoir, he and Cati grapple not only with these facts — and their implications in the eyes of the world — but also that despite those glares, HIV is, like anything else, a personal experience where people have to grapple with death and pain and loss. Peeters finds himself thrust into an experience where he has to contemplate what the future holds — or whether there is any future at all — and just how he is supposed to feel about it and be about it.
What’s most surprising about the book is that even with so many big issues contained in it, so much soul searching going on, it remains a terribly charming work filled with light moments, lovely scenes and interaction. There is a sweetness as well as an honesty — both are raw and, in that way, effective at relating the whole of this couple’s life together and how HIV sets at the center of much of their decision making. Furthermore, the author and his girlfriend come off as intelligent and well-humored and observant, the perfect sorts to guide an audience through what may well turn out to be the most heartbreaking of worlds.
Most importantly, Peeters book is a chronicle of that transition from youth to adulthood where you really begin to live your life for others as much as for yourself, where you begin to realize that your thoughts, your emotions, your actions are no longer entirely your own and that is not a bad thing — it’s a great one. His personal transition might contain the jolt brought along by HIV, but it’s a universal movement with which we each have our own version of what brings us to it. Everyone has something to manage in this transition and Peeters is able to show his forward trajectory and its stumbling grace with wit and wisdom.
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