Pedro and Me by Judd Winick

As mentioned in earlier reviews, I sometimes struggle with graphic novels. Although a child of the TV generation, I never learned to multitask quite as well as today’s youth, and my ability to track both images and words in a story is limited (don’t get me started on my strong distaste for subtitled films). And yet. Every once in a while you come across a graphic novel so good, you forget it is a graphic novel and just “read” it. This is one of those books. Judd Winick was on an MTV program called “Real World”, where young people were placed together in apartments around the world and forced to live with each other’s eccentricities all in the light of a constant set of cameras set to record their every argument and tryst. In Judd’s case, there was a twist. He was a fairly unassuming young cartoonist who was given a flamboyant young Cuban man, Pedro Zamora, as a roommate. Pedro had AIDS. Judd chronicles his experience confronting his own fears and his learning curve about the disease in this powerful nonfiction graphic novel. Judd and Pedro became friends, and Judd took on the very public fight to educate people about HIV when Pedro could not carry on. For a cartoonist, the prose is excellent. I think this is because Judd speaks honestly and openly. There isn’t any effort at “pretty literary technique” here, it’s just a real person, talking in depth about a very real event (which is not to say that it isn’t smart…he quotes John Irving at one point). This isn’t one of those “touching” books, it’s one of those “rip out your heart” books. Even thinking about it today makes me feel very weepy, but I truly believe it is one of the most powerful and intelligent books I have ever read. I don’t just recommend it, I think it should be a required read in every high school in America. Just don’t forget the Kleenex. Or your outrage.