The latest chapter in Marion Winik’s life revisits one of her earliest.

“It’s almost like a different person wrote that book and I’m visiting with her,” said the journalist, author, NPR contributor and University of Baltimore writing professor of her 1996 memoir, “First Comes Love.” The groundbreaking, raw remembrance detailed her passionate and tumultuous romance with Tony Heubach, an openly gay man who nonetheless married and had two children with Winik before his AIDS-related death in 1994.

In celebration of the memoir’s 30th anniversary, it’s been reissued as an unabridged audiobook read by Winik, and the paperback is being rereleased in January with a new introduction. Winik, whose story was even featured in a recent issue of People magazine, will speak about “First Comes Love” at The Ivy Bookshop on Thursday with fellow author Laura Lippman.

The renewed attention has allowed Winik, now 67, to revisit the person she used to be, and remind herself why she committed her story to words in the first place.

“It’s open communication with people who could be experiencing these things,” she said. “We speak more intimately in memoirs than we even do to our best friends — with a level of vulnerability.”

“First Comes Love’s” rerelease was born from a conversation with a UB student who was disappointed that there was no audio version. Intrigued by the idea, Winik contacted Penguin Random House, her original publisher, who agreed to release one.

I actually first met Winik when she interviewed me about my own grief memoir, “Black Widow,” for Kirkus back in 2020. Having narrated my audiobook, I know that reading your life out loud can be both profound and painful.

“Parts of it were so sad and difficult, and parts of it I loved doing, like meeting Tony at Mardi Gras, where I’m falling in love with him and it’s magical,” she said.

New Orleans, of course, is a magical place, which is perhaps why these two seemingly romantically incompatible kids decided to give it a go.

“We were two stereotypes: He was a wild gay man and I was a crazy romantic poetess,” Winik said. “In the end I had an unrealistic expectation — I think we both did — that we could make this work.”

Part of writing a memoir is examining the person you used to be from the perspective of time and wisdom. That wild poetess, in retrospect, was “so stubborn, so willful, so not listening to anyone,” Winik said.

Her insistence on making her relationship work was part of that willfulness. If he had survived, though, Winik thinks they would have eventually broken up and Tony would be partnered with a man, but the two of them would still co-parent their sons.

“In many ways, it never quite worked out. But it worked out enough that I have my sons and my grandchildren,” she said.

The last few years of their marriage were “truly a mess,” Winik said, and the memoir helped her process that. She started writing the book before Tony’s death, and he had helped her with it.

She assumed the book would be marketed as fiction because of the candidness and unlikely nature of her story, which included the couple’s heavy drug use at the time. “There are a lot of drugs in the story and at this point in my life I’m kind of grossed out by it. What the hell was wrong with us?" she said wryly.

Turns out the mid-1990s was a boom time for women memoirists writing about their shocking pasts, like Mary Karr’s “The Liar’s Club” and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s “Prozac Nation.” Winik was told her book had to be marketed as nonfiction “because the story is so crazy, it has to be asserted that it’s true,” she said.

Part of the truth of “First Comes Love” is that in the mid-’90s, having HIV/AIDS was almost certainly a death sentence. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. “Anyone who was diagnosed after 2000 has a pretty good chance of still being alive now,” Winik said of the “preventable and treatable” diagnosis.

Still, she doesn’t want those advancements to obscure the memory of the horrors of that time, replete with homophobia and ignorance. “It’s really important that we remember that generation that was so decimated,” she said. “The suffering those people went though was really unbelievable.”

Winik’s memoir coincidentally came out in 1996, the same year that the AIDS Memorial Quilt was last displayed in its entirety on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. I happened to cover it for the York Dispatch in Pennsylvania, moved to tears by the yawning loss represented in those lovingly made, bright panels.

Yes, things are better, but those people named on the quilt, frozen in time, are a reminder that the bad old days weren’t that long ago.

“How many people on that AIDS quilt have grandchildren?” Winik asked. “It’s easy to forget how terrible this was. I think we should remember.”