Washington Post columnist Judy Mann reviews Marion Winik's book, First Comes Love:

Marion Winik, a commentator with National Public Radio, was 24 years old, an inspiring poet living in New York, when she met Mario Anthony Heubach, an openly gay ice skater. She found his "combination of James Dean cool and genuine niceness ... wildly attractive." ... Marion was sitting in his lap within an hour of their first meeting.

She was a heavy heroin user, and he used just about everything but, an omission she quickly repaired. In a revealing note about her heroin use, she writes, "The minute someone said I shouldn't do something or I couldn't have something, this is not allowed, don't go in here, stay away, every cell in my body rushed toward it, every synapse in my brain started firing. I had to turn that no into a yes or die trying."

She used the same approach toward Tony, who was not much interested in having sex with her. She, on the other hand, was obsessed. Once she caught him French-kissing an old boyfriend, and she flew into a furniture-destroying rage...

They ended up settling in Austin and were married in March 1986. He took her name, discarding that of his father, whom he hated... Beauty, she writes, "had so much to do with it. I loved being with Tony because he was so beautiful." Sometimes he comes across as spoiled and self-centered, but then so does she. It is a testament to just how powerfully women are conditioned that she was determined to complete herself by having a family....

Tony tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS in 1985. At the time he figured he had been infected for three years. Remarkably, Marion, who had been sharing needles with him as well as occasional unsafe sex, was not infected. Her sister's heroin-using husband was also infected, although the sister was not, which got Marion to thinking the sisters had some kind of immunity....

The couple tried to minimize the risk of unprotected sex by limiting it to Marion's ovulation cycle. At the dawn of Ovulation Day, as she put it, she gave up all substances that were ever suspected of having harmful effects on fetuses.

The first baby, a boy, died in utero, days before he was to be born. The loss sent Tony back to drugs. He hit Marion, the first of many such incidents as he spiraled into despair. By the time their two other young sons were born, Tony was back to using cocaine and heroin.... By 1994 Marion realized that for her sake and her children's, she had to get Tony out of her house. She filed for divorce, severing the last tie that bound him to the living.

How could she? you might ask. She did what women too often fail to do: stop caring for abusive husbands and start caring for themselves and their children. At the end, however, she showed extraordinary courage and love for Tony by helping him die with a lethal overdose of Numbutal before he entered the final, humiliating stages of AIDS.

First Comes Love is a surprisingly intense and intimate book that leaves you wondering about the lengths to which people will go in defying norms.

[Ed.: The book jacket endorsements also include numerous praises for Ms. Winik's "courage."]

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