The Novel I Wrote Under Another Name
6 Nov 2026 · @Gail Weiner edited with Claude Opus 4.7 and 5.5
A London that no longer exists
I started writing Whole of the Moon in 2023 and finished it with Claude in December 2024. The book is set in a London in the early 1990s, a London that no longer exists: the hospital wards, the warehouses, the night buses at four in the morning, the flats where people took care of each other because the state would not. I was in the clubs. I was not on the ward. But I knew people who were, and I knew more who died.
I didn't write about any of it for thirty-five years because I didn't know what I was allowed to say. I wasn't the one dying. I wasn't the one nursing. What business did I have carrying any of it into a book.
What changed is that the people who could have told the story directly are mostly gone, and the witness is going with them. Fiction does something a memoir cannot: it gets inside the afternoons nobody wrote down. The tea round. The nurse who lied to a patient's mother on the phone because the truth would have killed her first.
Jessi Morris is me
The author on the cover of Whole of the Moon is Jessi Morris. Jessi Morris is me.
The photograph on her page is a real one, taken in 1996; twenty-something me, before any of the people I knew started to die. I wrote the book under a pen name because I needed one layer of distance from it to write it at all. I kept the pen name through publication because the story is not about me, and putting my own name on the cover felt like a claim I hadn't earned.
I'm telling you now because the book is sitting too quietly, and the people in it deserve for it to be found. Jessi Morris is a part of me that remembers things in the shape fiction holds best, and she gets to keep writing. The novel is mine.
Steven
Steven is the protagonist. Early twenties, beautiful, a new law degree in his hand and a flat share in north London with his best mate. None of his friends know he's bisexual. On a summer holiday in the Algarve he falls in love with a man, and he comes home HIV positive. Now there are two things he can't tell anyone.
The rave scene in the book is not a backdrop. It is the counterweight: the first place in any of our lives where it didn't matter who you were. Gay, straight, bi, posh, broke, out, not out. A warehouse in Hackney or King's Cross at two in the morning didn't care who had walked in. Everyone danced. Everyone was sweating and laughing and alive.
I still dance. In my kitchen, on a dance floor when I find one. It is my outlet and it has been for thirty years. I dance for the people who can't anymore. Steven lives at the centre of that, and at the centre of the ward, and the book is about how a person carries both at once.
I wanted to write someone who isn't a lesson. Steven is not a symbol of the crisis or a martyr to it. He is in his early twenties, carrying a diagnosis he cannot say out loud, trying to live a life around it.
The research
What surprised me most when I started writing was how little of that time was ever documented. The shame and the stigma did their work on the record too. Partners weren't legally next of kin, so when someone died, whatever they left behind usually went to a family that didn't want to remember how.
Gideon Mendel's The Ward is one of the only photographic records of it. He spent 1993 photographing the AIDS wards at the Middlesex Hospital in London, and Broderip was one of them. His pictures were my first way in: the beds, the drips, the visitors, the faces of men who knew exactly what was happening to them.
Broderip was the ward Princess Diana opened in April 1987, the visit where she shook a patient's hand without gloves in front of the cameras. A plaque went up to mark it, and it was covered almost straight away with a painting of flowers. Many of the families who came to visit had been told their son or brother or husband was in for something else: cancer, pneumonia, an infection nobody could name. A dedication from the Princess of Wales on an AIDS ward would have given it away. So the most famous handshake of the decade sat on the wall behind a picture of flowers, and mothers and fathers walked past it every visiting hour, keeping the lie they needed to keep.
Photographs could take me into the room. They couldn't tell me what the room felt like at three in the afternoon. For that I sat with people who had been there.
A nurse who worked on those wards talked to me for hours about the ordinary days, not the political ones. What you said to a patient's parents when you phoned them. What you did with the laundry. How the ward changed through the decade as the drugs changed.
A head sister gave me the hierarchy of care: who could crack and who couldn't, where you went to cry, how you held a shift together when half the ward was dying at once. She told me things she had never told anyone outside that building.
A long-term survivor gave me Steven's diagnosis. When he was told he was HIV positive in 1987, the way he took it became the way Steven takes it, with his permission. He wasn't a Broderip patient, but he and his partner were diagnosed together that year and they still see the same doctor nearly forty years later. He is the reason Steven doesn't read as a man I built out of research.
The three of them were generous past anything I had a right to ask. The book exists because they said yes.
Why now, and why alongside Elsinore
Two things are bringing the book forward this December. The first is World AIDS Day on 1 December, the day the people in those wards, and the people who loved them, are meant to be remembered. The second is Elsinore.
Andrew Scott's Ian Charleson biopic opens in the US on 20 November. Charleson played Hamlet at the National in 1989 while dying of AIDS and gave the performance of his life. He was dead eight weeks later. I saw the trailer and I understood something: the audience that comes out of that cinema will be looking for the rest of the story. The novel I wrote is one version of the rest of the story.
I'm not pretending Whole of the Moon stands next to Charleson's story. His was a public death at the centre of British theatre. Mine is a fictional young man in his early twenties with a flat share in north London and two secrets he can't tell his best mate. But the decade and the losses are the same, and the people who loved Ian Charleson also loved people like Steven.
Where to find it
Whole of the Moon is out now in paperback and audiobook through Simpatico Publishing. I wrote the book; Claude worked on voice consistency, developmental editing, and the cover; the audiobook is narrated by ElevenLabs. Simpatico credits its AI collaborators openly on every title.
If the book reaches you, pass it on.
About Gail Weiner
Gail Weiner is a Trust Architect and the founder of Simpatico Studios. She has spent twenty-eight years in technology, from business analysis in mobile to running a 60-person business unit with a seat at the executive table, and now works with executives on the AI decisions they can't take back. She has worked with Claude as a creative and strategic partner since 2023.
She has coached for six years. Her 2020 essay "Ultra-Independence Is a Trauma Response" has been read more than 277,000 times, and the revised second edition of her book, The Ultra-Independent Woman, is out on 8 December.
Through Simpatico Publishing she runs an AI-native imprint that names its AI collaborators on every title. Whole of the Moon, written as Jessi Morris, is the one Simpatico novel she wrote herself. Born in Johannesburg, she spent twenty years in Cape Town and now lives in Bristol, UK.
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