Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D'Allesandro Book

"ADONIS = NO AIDS"
Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D'Allesandro by Dodie Bellamy and Sam D'Allesdandro is a sister act of possession, charting the relationship between the spirits taking force over the bodies and sex lives of Dodie and Sam throughout the 1980s. This experimental epistolary AIDS memoir is cut up into three parts: the original correspondence between Mina/Dodie and SX/Sam; the transcription of Sam D'Allesandro's final story before his death; and a mind-bending post-humous letter from Mina to the ghost of Sam that pulls at the frayed edges of language and meaning. The letters contained in the first sections don't quite live up to Dodie Bellamy's larger The Letters of Mina Harker book, but they do remind us that - as with so many people who died during or survived through the AIDS crisis - they were kids, just trying to find their voices. The final letter, written five years after Sam's death, reveals a far more powerful and almost hallucinogenic tone - Mina Harker's strangehold on Dodie firm now, a spirit in full bodily and literary possession. Dodie/Mina writes, "[...] your eyes will remain unreadable to me, will never 'reveal' - but that's not the point, is it - the point is to look, not in horror not in pity not even in compassion, but to look as precisely as possible at the ever-wavering presence right in front of one - this is the closest beings as imperfect as we can come to love."