Our Favorite New Website: The Recollectors

Whitney Joiner, the senior features editor at Marie Claire magazine, and Alysia Abbott, the author of Fairyland, A Memoir of My Father, are great friends and, with their publishing cred, the epitome of New York cool girls. They have something else in common: They both lost their fathers to AIDS in 1992. Abbott’s father was an out gay man, living in San Francisco; Joiner’s dad was closeted in suburban Kentucky.

“Until meeting each other, we didn’t really know anyone else who could understand and relate to our experience,” the women write on their new website, TheRecollectors.com. “But considering that 650,000 people have died of AIDS in the U.S. since the advent of the crisis, we knew we couldn’t be the only ones.”

The Recollectors is a storytelling site and community for the kids who have lost their parents to AIDS. Because of the stigma around the disease, many have never shared their stories before. Silent no more: The Recollectors brings these (now adult) kids together to share in a modern mash-up of memoir and history, like a wonderfully evocative narrative version of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.