History happens on a grand scale, but it also affects individuals. The story of the AIDS crisis has been told in sweeping fashion in epics like Angels in America, but Emil Wilson’s new graphic novel, The Nightingales (Avid Reader), finds a new perspective on that narrative by focusing on one family whose lives are turned upside down in 1985 after the father invites Jim, a coworker with AIDS, to live with them. Although Wilson appears as a character in the loosely autobiographical story, the focus is on his sister, Lou, who is about to graduate high school when Jim moves in The Nightingales is also remarkable for Wilson’s sketchbook art style, which evokes half-remembered events and the liminal emotions of people who don’t always recognize their own feelings. PW spoke with Wilson about how his career in advertising shaped the book, old euphemisms around AIDS, and the nature of kindness.

This is your first graphic novel, and is influenced by things that happened to you in your youth. How long have you been waiting to tell this story?

I was a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies [in Vermont], and we had to do a thesis in our second year, which happened to coincide with the pandemic. I had flown home for spring break because my father had been given a terminal cancer diagnosis—he had been told that he had six months to live. He ended up living much longer, but that spring break was when the pandemic started. I never went back to Vermont [to finish the institution’s two-year program], and I was surrounded by the Covid-19 epidemic. There was just so much going on that summer in terms of George Floyd and people looking for some humanity. I wanted to tell a story that wasn't about me necessarily, because I didn't want to do a memoir. I kept thinking about stories from my family, and this one percolated to the top.

Why didn’t you want to do a memoir? You do pop up in the book a couple times, and you explain in the afterword that some of the things that happen to Lou actually happened to you in real life.

The reason I didn't want to do a memoir was because many years ago I had written a memoir and I had workshopped it, and I kept hearing from workshop participants, "You've got to go deeper." But I would be like, "I've gone as deep as I can go." So when I went to write this book, I didn’t want to deal with “go deeper.” I used my sister because when this story happened, I was away at college. I had come home and I met Jim, as the brother does in the book. I have an odd name, “Emil” is not a name that most people know. I thought, I've spent 60 years with this name, and now I'm going to use it to great effect by having this brother drop in. He has my same name, so you can put it together. Everybody else in the book has a different name than my family, but I used mine because I wanted to get some benefit from this name for the first time ever. So that’s where that came from. Pretty much everything in this book happened. But who it happened to, and the order that it happened—that I switched up.

The sketchbook art style is so beautiful. Is that your preferred style or did it just fit the story?

It came out of the nature of this story. My background is in advertising. I was an art director for advertising agencies, and one of the things that we do when we have an assignment is think about, what is a visual language that you can use to bring out things in that story? I'm a big fan of artist sketchbooks—sometimes I almost like them more than the artist's finished art, because it's a place where they experiment. It's a place where they're really expressive in a way they may not be in their art. They make mistakes, or they’ll start something and won't finish it. It feels like that’s the way a memory would look because you remember certain things, but not other things.

Something you capture in this book is the use of euphemisms during the AIDS crisis. Certain characters call Jim’s disease “cancer,” but other characters know it’s not cancer.

What's fascinating to me has been the amount of people that I've workshopped with who are in their twenties. I did one talk and someone raised their hands and said, "I don't really know that much about AIDS. Can you help me explain what that is?" I just thought, how wonderful that we have evolved so far that something so ingrained in my experience is so unknown to somebody else. As you bring up, one reason that a lot of people called it “gay cancer” for so long was not because they didn't know that AIDS existed, but because to say that it was AIDS immediately made the person gay, because that's what everybody thought AIDS was about. “Cancer” is just about illness, so it was a way to soften the blow of talking about AIDS. Even years after this book takes place, there was a huge epidemic at play and President Ronald Reagan wouldn't even mention the word because he was afraid if he said it, then we would all have to deal with it.

It really shows how remarkable your dad was, setting this story in motion by being kind to someone when no one else would.

Before my dad died, I was working on this book, and I spent some time talking with him. How often do you get to talk to one of your characters in real time and ask them questions? I said to him, "Why did you ask this man to move into our house?" And he's like, "Well, why wouldn't I?" And I'm like, "Why wouldn't you? Because he was sick, because your spouse wasn't on board, because he was a stranger to the family. I can think of several reasons.” And then he just said, "What do you think friendship is? Here's this person who was in need. I had a place that he could stay.” I’ve thought about that answer a lot in the years since he passed, because sometimes kindness can be complicated and you have to do it anyway.