Normal: A Chaplain, a Community with Hiv/Aids, and the Eternal Life of Stories

This book chronicles the intersection of chaplaincy, autopathography (illness narratives), and stigmatized illness through the observations and stories of a chaplain working at a facility for people with HIV and AIDS. Trained as both an ethnographer and a chaplain, Audrey Elisa Kerr uses memoir to bridge the relationship between caregiver and patient, and allows stories of marginality to frame both her patients' stories and her own. Audrey Elisa Kerr is a professor of English Literature at Southern Connecticut State University with a special interest in oral history, ethnography, and memoir. She is the author of The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Conspiracy and the Case of Black Washington, DC. She served people with HIV/AIDS as a chaplain for five years.