Author Victoria Noe returns to the Bureau to read from her new book Friend Grief and Men: Defying Stereotypes.

How do grief and friendships affect what it means to “be a man”? The final book in her series about people grieving the death of a friend examines the belief that men grieve differently than women – in fact, that their friendships are less meaningful than women’s.

Her interviews with gay and straight men will challenge that stereotype. The men profiled range in age from their 20’s to late 80’s. They include a sports reporter, writers, actor-turned-rabbi, sound editor and professional hockey player. All struggled to make sense of their grief, none more so than those in the book’s most talked-about chapter: comparing military veterans and long-term survivors in the AIDS community.

Joining Victoria is fellow ACT UP/NY member Jim Eigo, one of the men profiled in the book. You can count on a lively discussion about the challenges facing men who grieve the death of a best friend or dozens of friends, and how you can help them.

Victoria Noe lives in Chicago but is frequently in New York for research, theatre and addiction to the chai scones at Bosie Tea Parlor. The six books in her Friend Grief series (including Friend Grief and AIDS: Thirty Years of Burying Our Friends) have won awards and fans in the US, UK and Canada. Library Journal named her their first SELF-e Ambassador, helping libraries and independent authors collaborate.
 
Her essay, “Long-Term Survivor” won A&U Magazine’s 2015 Christopher Hewitt Award for Creative Nonfiction, and her work has appeared on a variety of blogs as well as Positively Aware, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post and Windy City Times. A fundraiser in the AIDS community in Chicago in the early days of the epidemic, she’s now a member of ACT UP/NY. Her next book is Fag Hags, Divas and Moms: The Legacy of Straight Women in the AIDS Community (2017).