Fenton Johnson's exquisitely written memoir will teach you more than any 50 self-help books. He dispenses no advice, but his book will give you wisdom and courage, no matter how different you think your story is from his. Johnson, the youngest of nine children from a Catholic family in rural Kentucky, did not intend to fall in love with Larry Rose, the only child of German Holocaust survivors, who was, at the time they met, HIV-positive and symptom-free. "I let him court me," Johnson writes.

—Harriet Lerner