Introduction & Overview of The Way We Live Now by Susan Sontag

The Way We Live Now Introduction

Susan Sontag's "The Way We Live Now" first appeared in the New Yorker in 1986. Narrated almost exclusively through dialogue, it tells of an unnamed man's struggle with the AIDS through the reactions of his large circle of friends.

Sontag began writing the story on the night she learned that a close friend had been diagnosed with AIDS. Very upset and unable to sleep, she took a bath; it was there that the story began to take shape. "It was given to me, ready to be born. I got out of the bathtub and started to write very quickly standing up. I wrote the story very quickly, in two days, drawing on experiences of my own cancer and a friend's stroke," she told Kenny Fries of the San Francisco Bay Times.

Selected for the collection The Best American Short Stories of 1987 and also included in The Best...
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