“A document of quiet authenticity about friendship (both its joys and its limitations), and the enormous value created family assumes when blood turns out to be thinner than water. . . . Hospital Time adds not only to the literature of AIDS, but to the exploration of friendship and family, and this place in the nineties among gay men and lesbians where their borders have begun to blur.”
— Carol Anshaw, Women's Review of Books
“Amy Hoffman’s searing honesty in Hospital Time is remarkable. Her prose reads like uncensored, yet witty and articulate, thought. The reader is privy to her innermost angst, as she explores her often contradictory feelings. . . . Her writing, like her honesty, is refresing, intriguing and vivid. . . . Cynical at times, personal, graphic and frank, Hospital Time speaks for those of us who have sat vigil in hard vinyl hospital chairs by a bedside, helplessly, while someone we love suffers, minute by excrutiating minute.” — Karen X. Tulchinsky, Lambda Book Report
“Hoffman’s spare and unflinching chronicle of serving as the primary caregiver for her friend Mike Reigle . . . who died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, differs from others in its almost complete refusal of poetic and metaphysical lyricism. . . . Its excellence derives from Hoffman’s disquiting ambivalence about her role as a caregiver to her idealistic but difficult friend and from her distrust of the transcendence of suffering.” — Richard McCann, Out
“With its rawness and immediacy, Hospital Time grips the reader from the first pages. . . . — Neil Miller, World
“Hospital Time is a brilliantly crafted memoir about the writer's struggle to bear witness to the death of a friend. Hoffman's story, written in short, breathtakingly compressed chapters, chronicles life at the center of the AIDS epidemic: intense, terrifying, simultaneously suffused with meaning and empty. Hoffman avoids any cliche of the noble death, instead offering us a relentless view of her own excruciating moral struggles in the face of her disintegrating family. Hospital Time moves, not in a straight line, but like life does—like AIDS does—unpredictably, unforgivingly: as a series of overlapping losses, each more devastating than the last.” — Stephanie Grant, author of The Passion of Alice
“Amy Hoffman details, without flinching, what it feels like to be responsible for a friend who is dying. From the middle of an experience most of us avoid at all costs and against a backdrop of far too many deaths, Hoffman constructs a sharp political memoir about the experience of lesbian and gay families in the time of AIDS. This insightful and disquieting book delivers a moving elegy on the quality of queer friendship, straight culture’s abdication on AIDS, the meaning of mourning, and the possibility of redemption.” — Urvashi Vaid, from the foreword
Hospital Time is necessary, powerful, full of the detail of authentic struggle, and beautifully done. Hoffman is right out there naked in real life with all her convictions and full sense of her community. Her book is a revelation.” — Dorothy Allison