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