The Observable Universe

January 22, 2024
Visual and performance artist McCalden grapples in her singular debut memoir with the void left by her parents’ deaths from AIDS as well as her own struggle to extract meaning from the tragedy. McCalden’s parents died in the early 1990s, when she was 10 years old. As an adult haunted both by her parents’ physical absence and by how little she knew about them, McCalden turned first to the internet and then to a private investigator to fill in the gaps. Short, kaleidoscopic passages flit from virological science gleaned from medical journals to the development of online networks, with musings on noir, McCalden’s hometown of Los Angeles, and snippets of personal history woven in along the way. Throughout, McCalden writes movingly about her disjointed upbringing—first with her parents, then with her grandmother— and draws astute parallels as the dawn of the internet converges with the peak of AIDS: “The virus is a condition of being human.... We’ve moved online, the viruses have followed.” By the final pages, however, that thread frays into perfunctory social media critique, which registers as a placeholder for the sparse amount of information McCalden is able to dig up about her parents. Still, this nebulous volume movingly illustrates the fragmentary experience of grief.