It was easy for Guibert’s new readers to remain unaware that, before the bombshell that was To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, he had written more than a dozen other books published by France’s most prestigious publishers, as well as having been a photographer with numerous exhibitions and a journalist for Le Monde and other outlets. The myth around the man was a simple yet seductive one. Hewent on to write two more volumes to create a trilogy around his experience with AIDS before his death, subsequent to a suicide attempt, at the end of 1991. In the wake of its publication and scandal, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life would sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and a groundswell of support would rise up for Guibert. The philosopher had already been dead for six years, reportedly of cancer, at the time the book was published, but his reputation was so firmly cemented that few French readers were deluded by the descriptions of a man named Muzil.Īs the man was described on his deathbed, there was an outcry among the French public: what right did this writer have to uncover these secrets? But this betrayal of Foucault’s confidences were merely the scandal of a moment Hervé Guibert’s most enduring influence has been in ending the silence imposed by the shame and stigma of AIDS. It was a book that did away with secrets, starting with the name of the disease: AIDS. It laid bare the symptoms of and treatments for the disease that had just befallen the narrator and author readers quickly understood that the only reason it turned its gaze upon the philosopher Michel Foucault was to lay bare the reality of how he, too, had in fact died of that same disease. The volume was an autofiction: drawing from life while not being bound purely to the facts. This myth owes its origins to a single book, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. The myth of Hervé Guibert is that of the cruelly beautiful man who betrayed his friends, the writer of sex and death who would die of a sexually-transmitted disease.
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