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Summary
Summary
"You are eighteen years old. You get up in front of a thousand people - your classmates, your friends, basically the people who make up your entire existence - and announce, 'I'm HIV positive.'" Told entirely in sequential art, here is the story of the life-changing friendship between the author, a cartoonist from Long Island, and Pedro Zamora, an HIV-positive AIDS activist, which was filmed day by day on MTV's Real World San Francisco.As a speaker and educator, a guest on many talk shows (including Oprah), and when his tragic death received front-page coverage in the press, Pedro taught a generation that AIDS was not a punishment for moral defects or a mere killer that reduced humans to wraiths. Rather, he showed how those afflicted with the disease could live and love nobly with intelligence, humor and great humanity. Judd Winick's compelling memoir allows each of us to experience the vitally important message Pedro brought us.Inspiring, moving, informative, and instantly accessible, Pedro and Me could become one of the books that defines a generation.
Author Notes
Judd Winick is a comic strip and television writer personality. Member of a reality show on MTV called The Real World in 1994 and created the animated series The Life and Times of Juniper Lee on the Cartoon Network.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this powerful and captivating graphic novel, Winick, a professional cartoonist and cast member of MTV's The Real World 3: San Francisco, pays tribute to his Real World housemate and friend Pedro Zamora, an AIDS activist and educator who died of the disease in 1994. Striking just the right balance of cool and forthrightness sure to attract a broad cross section of teens, twenty-somethings and beyond, Winick describes the special bond he developed with Zamora and shares some of his own journey to enlightenment about AIDS awareness. From Winick's initial preconceptions about the disease to the ultimate moments of heartbreaking loss, the author bravely invites readers into a life-altering experience. The result is never mawkish: Winick speaks of his friend not with otherworldly awe, but with palpable love and warmth and profound admiration. Readers unfamiliar with the graphic novel genre would do well to start with this title. Winick imbues deceptively simple black-and-white comic-strip art with a full spectrum of emotion, and his approach is particularly adept at conveying Zamora's mind-set; for instance, a series of partial views of Zamora driving, just after he's received the news that he's HIV positive, communicates Zamora's anxiety and confusion. Throughout, Winick depicts Zamora as a vital force, a tireless teacher using frank language to relate facts about how people contract the virus that causes AIDS, how they can prevent it and how they can live with it. An innovative and accessible approach to a difficult subject. Ages 14-up. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Middle School, High School) MTV's long-running series The Real World places seven twenty-something strangers in a house and records their often-edgy interactions in cinema verit+ fashion. This volume-an account of the author's friendship with Pedro Zamora, one of his Real World housemates-with its engaging graphic format and pithy text, is a good match for the highly visual, documentary style of the television program. Judd Winick, recently out of college and foundering in his goal of becoming a professional cartoonist, applies to be on the show, but is taken aback when asked how he'd feel about living with someone who is HIV positive. He gives the politically correct answers, but expresses reservations to a friend: ""I'm surprised I'm uncomfortable.... I'm a big weenie liberal. I'm supposed to be OK with stuff like this, aren't I?"" Relocating to San Francisco for the series, Judd meets his new roommate, a charismatic twenty-one-year-old named Pedro Zamora. Pedro, who left his native Cuba in the Mariel Boatlift, grew up in Miami and became sexually active at an early age. HIV positive by seventeen, he was a nationally recognized AIDS educator who hoped his television role would show viewers ""you could succeed and live with AIDS and HIV."" Winick skims over much of what happens in the Real World house (the banishment of the notorious housemate Puck, for instance, is relegated to a single panel of art), focusing instead on his growing friendship with Pedro-recording their bantering conversations, observing Pedro's frank school lectures on safer sex, and sharing his own fears when his friend's condition worsens. The vigorous comic-strip art, notable for its expressive depictions of real-life characters and variety of layout and perspective, does not diminish the seriousness of the subject matter. The most moving scenes show the continuing relationship between Judd and Pedro after The Real World finishes taping. Former cast-member Pam, who later became Judd's girlfriend, takes time off from medical school to be with their dying friend while Judd fulfills Pedro's commitment to give AIDS education lectures across the country. Both are with Pedro when he dies. At the beginning of the book, Winick recalls that ""by appearing on the show, [Pedro] gave the world a chance to listen to him and see him live."" In this warm and ultimately life-affirming remembrance, Winick gives the world a second chance to know Pedro and hear his message. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Gr. 8^-12. Winick, part of the 1993 television cast of MTV's Real World, San Francisco, uses his cartoonist skills to take readers back to the house where the show was set and tell the story of his fellow cast mate Pedro Zamora, an AIDS educator who died in 1994 from complications related to HIV. Part lesson about AIDS, part biographical sketch, this book differs from the many graphic novels that rely on action drawings or high-octane plotting. It's facial expressions that count most here, and they are Winick's forte as he briefly recalls how he came to the show, his evolving friendship with Zamora, whose background he describes, and his growing understanding of AIDS, which broadened the boundaries of his world. More about the show would have been useful: Winick assumes familiarity with the setup and cast, which some teens may not have. And the resemblance between Winick and Zamora in the artwork (a photo on the jacket does show some likeness in real life) is occasionally disconcerting. Most memorable is Winick's heartfelt description of Zamora's final days (he died at the age of 22), which are described with great tenderness and a keen sense of the loss of a friend. --Stephanie Zvirin
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-In graphic-novel format, Winick addresses the moral depth of friendship, the molding processes of family, the attention required to discern and pursue a vocation, HIV education, acceptance of gay-identifying youth by themselves and by their families, and the role of death in the human life cycle. The author does a stellar job of marrying image to word to form a flowing narrative. He introduces readers to his own formation as a cartoonist wanna-be, and how he landed a role in MTV's The Real World series in order to live rent-free in San Francisco for six months. Among his television producer-selected roommates was Pedro Zamora, a Cuban immigrant who developed HIV as a teenager. Pedro's response to his diagnosis was to become an HIV educator, traveling around the nation to give informed and inspirational speeches in venues that included schools. Zamora and Winick became close friends after the author's initial trepidation about sharing living space with a gay man infected with the AIDS virus. The role of another of their roommates, a female Asian-American medical student, both in Winick's education and his personal life, is nicely folded into his account. The story continues through Zamora's decline and death to the periods of grieving and grief recovery that followed for Winick, Zamora's family, and his many friends. This is an important book for teens and the adults who care about them. Winick handles his topics with both sensitivity and a thoroughness that rarely coexist so seamlessly.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Cartoonist Winick paints an emotional, graceful portrait of the life of Pedro Zamora, his roommate on the forerunner to today's reality-TV craze, MTV's The Real World. When the seven castmembers first met in San Francisco in early 1994, they knew one of them was HIV-positive, but not which one. Winick soon discovered that it was his chosen roommate, openly gay, Cuban-born Pedro. Wasting little time here on his own initial concerns, Winick delves into some subtle, very effective myth-bashing regarding AIDS and HIV, mostly through the straightforward, ebullient words of Pedro, who was diagnosed when he was 17 and started working as an AIDS educator soon after. Winick leavens the chronicle of Pedro's illness with his romance with--and subsequent on-air marriage to--Sean, Winick's own blossoming love for a fellow castmember, funny injections of camp (" 'How was I going to say it without saying it?' . . . 'I could really go for some fruit. Speaking of fruit . . .' "), and a taste of the behind-the-scenes angst of living life in front of a TV audience for six months. The depiction of Pedro's spiral toward death, at the age of 22, is difficult, but ultimately uplifting, to read. The format--a memoir in the form of a graphic novel--is enticing, with images that are effusive and alive on the page and dialogue bubbles full of language spoken in unsparing terms and teaching some urgent lessons. Engrossing, wise, and impossibly brave. (Nonfiction. 12+) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Pedro Zamora was a Cuban immigrant who became an AIDS educator after getting an HIV diagnosis (he died in 1994 in his early twenties). He became a public figure because of his health battle and appearance, along withÅcartoonist Winick,Åon MTV's The Real World San Francisco. Winick's memoir tells the story of their friendship and has become a memorial to a man who made the most of the life he had. This title has won a number of awards, including a YALSA top ten, and is great for teens up.-Martha Cornog, Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Chapter 1 The Shuttle Guy | p. 6 |
| Chapter 2 This Is Where I Come From | p. 10 |
| Chapter 3 This Is Where I Come From: Part Two | p. 32 |
| Chapter 4 Six Months Below the Crookedest Street in the World | p. 60 |
| Chapter 5 Good-byes | p. 118 |
| Epilogue: The Return of the Shuttle Guy | p. 172 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 181 |
| Updates | p. 185 |
| Organizations | p. 186 |
