SOURCE: Gilbert, Harriet. “Education of the Heart.” New Statesman and Society 4, no. 144 (29 March 1991): 23-4.

In the following essay, Gilbert discusses Sontag's writings on cancer and AIDS, using interview quotes to illustrate the author's opinions and confusion surrounding the social implications involved with these diseases.

Like Woody Allen in Zelig, Susan Sontag appears to have been there, boots planted centre-stage, at every cultural high spot of the last quarter-century: the “youth movement” of the 1960s; opposition to the Vietnam war; feminism; anti-censorship … Aptly enough, she even popped up in Zelig itself.

This week, she has been in London raising money for Aids, an event centred on the re-publication of her New Yorker story “The Way We Live Now”—about a network of friends, of whom one is in hospital with Aids—in book form, with lithograph illustrations by Howard Hodgkin, the Turner Prize-winning British artist. In a gap between...