Melanie Brooks
pub. 2023; audiobook pub. 2024
298 pages
Vine Leaves Press

The Cost of Keeping Secrets

By Sarah C. Baldwin

Nearly four decades after HIV/AIDS emerged as a public health crisis, advances in treatment and changes in public opinion have made it easy to forget the crushing, even fatal, homophobia and ostracism suffered by those afflicted with the disease in the early years. So damning was the stigma, it stifled even those who contracted the disease not through sexual contact but through contaminated blood.

A Hard Silence is the story of one such individual, a victim of Canada’s “tainted blood scandal,” in which nearly two thousand patients in the early 1980s were infected with HIV as a result of mismanagement of the national blood supply. It is also the story of the damaging effects of discrimination and silence. And it is the story of one woman’s decision to liberate herself from that silence and live in truth.

Thirteen-year-old Melanie Brooks adored her father, a prominent and well-respected Canadian thoracic surgeon—so respected, in fact, that when Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth II visited the country, he was the surgeon on call. He was the head and hero of their household, a tall and handsome man who regularly “swooped in” to have dinner with his wife and four children before returning to his patients at the hospital. As the only daughter, the author shared a special bond with her dad, whose monikers for her included “Meligans” and “Melanie Joybells.”

Understandably, Brooks—along with the rest of her family—felt the foundations of her world tremble when he had a heart attack in 1985, at the age of 42. Seeing her beloved, “invincible” dad in the hospital bed, breathing tube inserted, was terrifying.

But the worst was still to come. During the open-heart surgery that saved his life, Brooks’s father received a blood transfusion. Eight months later, the Canadian government informed him that he had received contaminated blood: he was HIV positive. Brooks’s parents resolved not to tell anyone—and Brooks herself has no memory of their telling her. Instead she remembers simply “knowing,” and being alone in that knowledge: “Nobody was talking,” she writes. At 13, she felt “[a]n unsure guilt from carrying a secret that was not mine.”

While the decision to keep a secret this consequential might seem hard to fathom, it is understandable. This was the era when TIME magazine referred to people with AIDS as “the new untouchables” and Pat Buchanan declared the disease “Nature’s revenge on homosexuals.” Just as constraining, the Brooks family were pillars of their insular evangelical community, whose members considered homosexuality a “sinful lifestyle choice.” As the son of a Baptist minister, her father’s homophobia, Brooks writes, was “fixed in him.” And, of course, they believed he didn’t have long to live: they had no idea they’d have to keep their secret for the next nine years.

During that time, the family adhered to a “standard script” of pretending all was well. Brooks’s mother “downplayed, defected, or reassured” anytime Brooks asked about her father’s illness. It would take Brooks three decades of internalizing her fear and grief—including three years talking with a therapist—to come to terms with her father’s illness and death, and to claim her right to tell her own story.

Brooks gracefully weaves that story together from chapters that flow forward and loop backward in time. In one thread, she affectingly describes what it was like for her as a young person to live within her family as the tragedy unfolded, fearing her father might die at any moment yet implicitly forbidden from addressing the deadly elephant in the room—until the day she confronted her mother in the car before school:

“Tell me,” I said…as Mom pulled up against the curb and turned in her seat toward me. “Is Dad going to die?” I turned too and faced her directly. My eyes locked on hers.

She gripped the steering wheel with her gloved hands and inhaled a measured breath. Then, speaking in a defeated voice I’d never heard before, she said, “Yes.”

The single word ripped through the protective blanket that she’d wrapped around me for the past four years. It tracked into my mind, sinking like a stone to the ocean floor, where it settled for good.

Another thread describes with excruciating clarity the final year of her father’s life, up to (and beyond) his death in late 1995, surrounded by his family. At one point he peruses the L.L. Bean catalog, selecting Christmas presents for each family member. Brooks places his order for him, privately wondering if he will be there to see them unwrapped. (He won’t.) As he lay dying, Brooks writes, “Dad’s breathing became our central focus. Everything else seemed like another place. Somewhere I used to live.”

The third thread is what makes this memoir more than a tale of loss, but also a depiction of the decades-long consequences of suffocating secrecy—the “hard silence” of the title. This thread recounts what Brooks, now a young mother, calls her “psychological freefall” during the 2010s, when more than 20 years of “quarantined grief” threatened to break loose and smother her. Through vivid descriptions of panic attacks and reconstructed sessions with Dr. B, the wise and kind therapist she begins seeing, we see Brooks very gradually come to face not only sadness and loss, but also her anger at the expectations her family placed on her—to be cheerful, to be “the sunny daughter,” to be a high achiever, to “always make it look good.” The turning point comes when Dr. B helps Brooks see that while her trauma and grief are real, she herself is not “broken.” This is what finally allows her to “unpack this story and learn to carry it differently.”

In spite of the agony and the anger, A Hard Silence is a gift to read. We are clearly in the hands of a consummate writer. Indeed, Brooks teaches creative professional writing, creative nonfiction, and narrative medicine; her first book, Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma, came out in 2017. A Hard Silence is filled with poignant, beautifully wrought scenes anchored by perfect, time- and age-specific details: Potato Stix, Hungry Hippos, the Challenger disaster, MacGyver, the Ryan White story, St. Elmo’s Fire. Her use of figurative language is as on target as a dart in a bullseye, as when she compares the word “Anyway” as the “checkered flag” her family used to push a conversation to its finish line.

In our own pandemic-inflected moment, we can hope that the vulnerability and courage Brooks demonstrates will encourage others to open up, to share rather than stifle, and to know they are not alone.