SOURCE: Rollyson, Carl. “AIDS.” In Reading Susan Sontag: A Critical Introduction to Her Work, pp. 143-55. Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 2001.

In the following essay, Rollyson examines Sontag's short story “The Way We Live Now” and her book-length essay AIDS and Its Metaphors, comparing and contrasting the two, their respective critical appraisals, and includes some commentary on each by Sontag herself.

Stirred by the deaths of friends who had succumbed to a new, terrifying, and bewildering disease, Susan Sontag responded by writing two very different treatments of how AIDS attacked the health of individuals and society. Her story “The Way We Live Now” (1986) and book-length essay AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989) epitomize the way she has tried to bridge the gap between the dramatic and expository modes of her imagination. The story became an instant classic, reprinted at the beginning of The Best American Short Stories, 1987, dramatized in performances...