Strange Bedfellows by Ina Park

Strange Bedfellows: Adventures in the Science, History, and Surprising Secrets of STDs
By Ina Park
Flatiron Books, 2021

Ina Park, associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and a medical consultant at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sets herself an almost impossible task in her new book Strange Bedfellows: Adventures in the Science, History, and Surprising Secrets of STDs - a touchy, itchy, almost impossible task. In these pages, she seeks not only to demystify the social and natural history of sexually transmitted infections but also, maybe more importantly, to de-stigmatize STIs across the board. 

She recognizes how tough the task is. “Even with the ubiquity of STIs, I knew that most people (even health care providers) simply don’t feel comfortable discussing them,” she writes at the beginning of Strange Bedfellows. “For most of us, having sex is much easier than talking about sex, especially its least pleasant consequences.”

It must be said of Strange Bedfellows that this kind of talking about sex and some of its worst consequences is as easy as falling out of bed. Park’s professional credentials are obvious and extensive, but it’s her easy, cheery writing style that carries the book. She makes the smart decision to ground virtually all of the enormous amount of information she wants to convey in the form of individual people - friends, patients, family members; this book is every bit as informative as a diagnostic overview would be, but it couldn’t be more different as a reading experience. 

From HPV (human papillomavirus) to syphilis to HIV to homely old genital herpes, the book probes into every cranny of its many subjects, and Park writes about all of it with a commonizing touch that’s wonderfully inviting, even in the frequent instances where her mom-humor verges on the wince-worthy:

Once inside the throat, gonorrhea can sit for weeks or months hanging out with its cousins, other species of Neisseria that have names reminiscent of hip-hop artists: flava, subflava, sicca. These are permanent residents of the mouth and aren’t thought to cause any harm. Sometimes Neisseria meningitidis can also be present, a strain that can cause severe infections such as meningitis or also reside quietly without causing symptoms.

Time and again in Park’s book, she dramatizes That Conversation, whether it’s between a parent and a child or between two lovers or between a doctor and a (typically dazed and sometimes denying) client, and her writing skills are such that every time, That Conversation is as squirmy-difficult to read as it is to experience. But if Strange Bedfellows doesn’t make that considerably easier, it’s hard to imagine what would.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The National. He writes regularly for The Vineyard Gazette, the Daily Star and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.