Inside:
Reality TV Shocker! Real World Book Is Touching, Deep and Serious

September 12, 2000
By PJ Mark

At a time when television boasts a creepy, manipulative naked guy who gets a million dollars for surviving on an island, and the public is asked to care about the 24/7 lives of a group of intolerable roommates gunning for a half a million dollars while claiming they're just "in it for the experience," comes a book born of reality TV with something meaningful to say.

The new work is Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss and What I Learned, an illustrated memoir written by Judd Winick about his relationship with Pedro Zamora, one of his housemates on the MTV show The Real World, who was HIV-positive during the taping in 1993. The young-adult trade paperback, just published by Henry Holt and Co., has strong word of mouth among booksellers and starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and others.

An illustrated novel that is also a trade paperback original can be considered a hard sell -- especially to young-adult book award boards -- but the grown-up comic-book form may, in fact, be particularly appealing to a young people raised on the more junior kind. And thanks to Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus (Pantheon), so-called serious readers have come to embrace the style. Almost 3,000 copies of the trade paperback edition of the first installment of Maus, originally published in 1986, were sold at Barnes & Noble and B. Dalton's nationwide last year. And Dan Frank, editorial director of Pantheon, is overseeing a recently launched list of comic-book style hardcover novels.

But Winick's book is directed at young adults for a reason. According to the Centers for Disease Control, almost of half of new HIV cases occur among people under the age of 25. Says Beth Feldman, director of marketing for books for young readers at Henry Holt and Co.: "It was a natural for that audience. We were not worried at all about also reaching the adult market."

Pedro and Me documents the third season of The Real World, which was set in San Francisco. This series of episodes helped advance a culturally significant shift in AIDS education and acceptance. Every week, viewers (many of them teens at the time) saw a handsome young man battling HIV/AIDS -- not just a news report of a dying patient. While hardly so long ago, 1993 was still a time when most people diagnosed with the disease died and promising treatments had yet to be concocted. Zamora, himself, died in 1994 making international news.

"The young adult market is more liberal than most," Feldman says. "But I don't know if this book could have been published in 1993." It also took that long for Winick to be able to write about the experience. Feldman says Winick was so emotionally worn out from filling in on Zamora's lecture circuit that it "took a while to process everything until he was able to tell the story."

The story begins, briefly, with Judd's struggling career as a cartoonist and his audition for The Real World. But the story then shifts to Zamora and their meeting as roommates.

Winick describes Zamora as a boy in Cuba, where the local sage labeled him a Grande Cabeza -- a wise one -- allowing him to attend religious ceremonies meant only for adults. When he was 8 years old, he and half of his family were among the 125,000 refugees who fled to America during the Mariel Boatlift. While he was still in his early teens, he saw his mother die of skin cancer. At 17, Zamora contracted the virus that causes AIDS and soon became an AIDS educator.

As much as the book is a tribute to Zamora, it is also a touching account of Winick's initial apprehension toward and misunderstanding of HIV. Winick is now engaged to fellow Real World-er Pam Ling, who also knew Zamora. Ling and Winick often played down Zamora's condition -- like night sweats and exhaustion from the stress of the show -- in their weekly confessionals. "It was important to him that he not be viewed as sick but just like everybody else," Winick writes in the book. "Pedro hid a lot. Pam and I helped him hide it. We felt a responsibility to honor his mission."

Because it is a graphic memoir, Pedro and Me will undoubtedly be compared to Maus. Both use an unusual medium -- cartoons -- to tell a deeply personal story (of parents, a friend) while also invoking universal themes (the Holocaust, AIDS). If the flood of e-mails Winick is receiving from readers is any indication, the quiet buzz the book has been generating since its August release is growing louder. In its first week in the stores, Barnes & Noble and B. Dalton's sold 10 copies nationwide. Two weeks later, those chains sold 134 copies.

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