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Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death
Anatole Broyard, long-time book critic, book review editor, and essayist for theÌý New York Times , wants to be remembered. He will be, with this collection of irreverent, humorous essays he wrote concerning the ordeals of life and death—many of which were written during the battle with cancer that led to his death in 1990.Ìý
AÌý New York TimesÌý Notable Book of the YearÌý
“A heartbreakingly eloquent and unsentimental meditation on mortality . . . Some writing is so rich and well-spoken that commentary is superfluous, even presumptuous. . . . Read this book, and celebrate a cultured spirit made fine, it seems, by the coldest of touches.� � Los Angeles Times
“Succeeds brilliantly . . . Anatole Broyard has joined his father but not before leaving behind a legacy rich in wisdom about the written word and the human condition. He has died. But he lives as a writer and we are the wealthier for it.� � The Washington Post Book World
“A virtuoso performance . . . The central essays of Intoxicated By My Illness Ìýwere written during the last fourteen months of Broyard’s life. They are held in a gracious setting of his previous writings on death in life and literature, including a fictionalized account of his own father’s dying of cancer. The title refers to his reaction to the knowledge that he had a life-threatening illness. His literary sensibility was ignited, his mind flooded with image and metaphor, and he decided to employ these intuitive gifts to light his way into the darkness of his disease and its treatment. . . . Many other people have chronicled their last months . . . Few are as vivid as Broyard, who brilliantly surveys a variety of books on illness and death along the way as he draws us into his writer’s imagination, set free now by what he describes as the deadline of life. . . . [A] remarkable book, a lively man of dense intelligence and flashing wit who lets go and yet at the same time comtains himself in the style through which he remains alive.â€� â€� The New York Times Book Review
“Despite much pain, Anatole Broyard continued to write until the final days of his life. He used his writing to rage, in the words of Dylan Thomas, against the dying of the light. . . . Shocking, no-holds-barred and utterly exquisite.� � The Baltimore Sun
AÌý New York TimesÌý Notable Book of the YearÌý
“A heartbreakingly eloquent and unsentimental meditation on mortality . . . Some writing is so rich and well-spoken that commentary is superfluous, even presumptuous. . . . Read this book, and celebrate a cultured spirit made fine, it seems, by the coldest of touches.� � Los Angeles Times
“Succeeds brilliantly . . . Anatole Broyard has joined his father but not before leaving behind a legacy rich in wisdom about the written word and the human condition. He has died. But he lives as a writer and we are the wealthier for it.� � The Washington Post Book World
“A virtuoso performance . . . The central essays of Intoxicated By My Illness Ìýwere written during the last fourteen months of Broyard’s life. They are held in a gracious setting of his previous writings on death in life and literature, including a fictionalized account of his own father’s dying of cancer. The title refers to his reaction to the knowledge that he had a life-threatening illness. His literary sensibility was ignited, his mind flooded with image and metaphor, and he decided to employ these intuitive gifts to light his way into the darkness of his disease and its treatment. . . . Many other people have chronicled their last months . . . Few are as vivid as Broyard, who brilliantly surveys a variety of books on illness and death along the way as he draws us into his writer’s imagination, set free now by what he describes as the deadline of life. . . . [A] remarkable book, a lively man of dense intelligence and flashing wit who lets go and yet at the same time comtains himself in the style through which he remains alive.â€� â€� The New York Times Book Review
“Despite much pain, Anatole Broyard continued to write until the final days of his life. He used his writing to rage, in the words of Dylan Thomas, against the dying of the light. . . . Shocking, no-holds-barred and utterly exquisite.� � The Baltimore Sun
135 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
39 people are currently reading
993 people want to read
About the author
Anatole Broyard
15Ìýbooks39ÌýfollowersAnatole Paul Broyard was an American writer, literary critic and editor for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993), were published after his death.
After his death, Broyard became the center of controversy and discussions related to how he had chosen to live as an adult in New York. He was criticized for failing to acknowledge his black ancestry.
After his death, Broyard became the center of controversy and discussions related to how he had chosen to live as an adult in New York. He was criticized for failing to acknowledge his black ancestry.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
January 27, 2015
I was happy to finally collect Broyard's book on his encounter with prostate cancer, a cancer that eventually robbed him of his life and discovered an author who expresses some of the anguish, pain and peculiar emotions that come with life-threatening illnesses. It is odd but for so long I searched for a voice like this. While I lay in the hospital my body riddled with cancer and at the mercy of the routine of chemotherapy I searched high and low for an author like Broyard, for someone who could express what I was unable to articulate. I knew the feelings I was experiencing were nothing new, that others had been through similar experiences, but I found few reflections of my experiences and my own approach to the experience beyond the words and works of David Wojnarowicz, Mark Doty, Paul Monette and Jonathan Kivett. Broyard is one of those rare authors who is able to capture the elusive qualities of disease, desire and death and how it transforms each of us in the process. Maybe it was his work as a critic, deeply embedded in literature and writing which allows him to write so clearly. He suggests "...I am a critic, and being critically ill, I thought I might accept the pun and turn it on my condition." (19) His words, his language express so much that I felt. It is an ironical pleasure to finally encounter an author who not writes so beautifully about such life-changing experiences but also a pleasure to encounter feelings rarely expressed anywhere in print.
"Illness is primarily a drama, and it should be possible to enjoy it as well as to suffer it. I see now why the Romantics were so fond of illness-the sick man sees everything as metaphor. In this phase I'm infatuated with my cancer. It stinks of revelation." Anatole Broyard, 7.
Last night I had the pleasure of finishing Anatole Broyard's wonderful memoir of his encounter with prostate cancer, which led to his eventual death. As I wrote before Broyard's memoirs are written beautifully but more important they express feelings that had consumed me while living through my own battle with lymphona just a few short years ago. While I was recovering I searched high and low for a literature of dying, to find solace, to find reflections of my own experiences. Broyard calls it the "literature of extreme situation" and although I cobbled together my own collection of literature of dying, it is so pleasurable to uncover Broyard's uniquely, critical evaluation of his own experience of death and dying. He privileges the power of narrative to help contain contagion and disease. To give it form and meaning, something I was always aware but unable to articulate with the same clarity. He writes;
"I’m not a doctor, and even as a patient I’m a mere beginner. Yet I am a critic, and being critically ill, I thought I might accept the pun and turn it on my condition. My initial experience of illness was a series of disconnected shocks, and my first instinct was to try to bring it under control by turning it into a narrative. Always in emergencies we invent narratives. We describe what is happening, as if to confine the catastrophe. When people heard that I was ill, they inundated me with stories of their own illnesses, as well as the cases of friends. Storytelling seems to be a natural reaction to illness. People bleed stories, and I’ve become a blood bank of them. The patient has to start by treating his illness not as a disaster, an occasion for depression or panic, but as a narrative, a story. Stories are antibodies against illness and pain.� (19-20)
Broyard cloaked himself in literature and narratives and adopted a critical stance in order to manage his own death. His wife, Alexandra Broyard, who collected these writings quotes a family friend, Michael Vincent Miller...“For Anatole style was a means of connecting with eternity, and literature a replacement for religion, a way to cope with death.� (135).
"Illness is primarily a drama, and it should be possible to enjoy it as well as to suffer it. I see now why the Romantics were so fond of illness-the sick man sees everything as metaphor. In this phase I'm infatuated with my cancer. It stinks of revelation." Anatole Broyard, 7.
Last night I had the pleasure of finishing Anatole Broyard's wonderful memoir of his encounter with prostate cancer, which led to his eventual death. As I wrote before Broyard's memoirs are written beautifully but more important they express feelings that had consumed me while living through my own battle with lymphona just a few short years ago. While I was recovering I searched high and low for a literature of dying, to find solace, to find reflections of my own experiences. Broyard calls it the "literature of extreme situation" and although I cobbled together my own collection of literature of dying, it is so pleasurable to uncover Broyard's uniquely, critical evaluation of his own experience of death and dying. He privileges the power of narrative to help contain contagion and disease. To give it form and meaning, something I was always aware but unable to articulate with the same clarity. He writes;
"I’m not a doctor, and even as a patient I’m a mere beginner. Yet I am a critic, and being critically ill, I thought I might accept the pun and turn it on my condition. My initial experience of illness was a series of disconnected shocks, and my first instinct was to try to bring it under control by turning it into a narrative. Always in emergencies we invent narratives. We describe what is happening, as if to confine the catastrophe. When people heard that I was ill, they inundated me with stories of their own illnesses, as well as the cases of friends. Storytelling seems to be a natural reaction to illness. People bleed stories, and I’ve become a blood bank of them. The patient has to start by treating his illness not as a disaster, an occasion for depression or panic, but as a narrative, a story. Stories are antibodies against illness and pain.� (19-20)
Broyard cloaked himself in literature and narratives and adopted a critical stance in order to manage his own death. His wife, Alexandra Broyard, who collected these writings quotes a family friend, Michael Vincent Miller...“For Anatole style was a means of connecting with eternity, and literature a replacement for religion, a way to cope with death.� (135).
April 12, 2013
Inteligente y brillante. Es muy breve y se lee de un tirón. A partir de la tercera parte empiezan lo bueno. La reflexión sobre los médicos que deberÃan leer poesÃa me parece preciosa. La historia del padre tremenda.
Gracias, Anatole.
Gracias, Anatole.
March 22, 2019
Sublime, excepcional. Una lección de vida. Uno de los mejores libros que he leÃdo.
December 3, 2019
This posthumous collection brings together essays Broyard wrote for the New York Times after being diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer in 1989, journal entries, a piece he’d written after his father’s death from bladder cancer in 1954, and essays from the early 1980s about “the literature of death.� He writes to impose a narrative on his illness, expatiating on what he expects of his doctor and how he plans to live with style even as he’s dying. “If you have to die, and I hope you don’t, I think you should try to die the most beautiful death you can,� he charmingly suggests. It’s ironic that he laments a dearth of literature (apart from, chiefly, Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag) about illness and dying � if only he could have seen the flourishing of cancer memoirs in the last two decades!
[An interesting footnote: in 2007 Broyard’s daughter Bliss published a memoir, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets, about finding out that her father was in fact black but had passed as white his whole life. I’ll be keen to read that.]
[An interesting footnote: in 2007 Broyard’s daughter Bliss published a memoir, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets, about finding out that her father was in fact black but had passed as white his whole life. I’ll be keen to read that.]
March 27, 2009
There should be a special shelf for books you wanted passionately to admire, books that it breaks your heart not to have loved. This is one of them. Anatole Broyard was an extraordinary writer with a breadth of knowledge that took your breath away. I thought—I hoped—he’d have something amazing to say about his experience of dealing with cancer. What he winds up saying in this book deserves our respect—if only because he skillfully avoids every cliché, platitude, and bromide about dying (all the ones we already know and which are precisely why we turn to a book like this, because most of what’s written about illness and death is intolerable). Broyard said no less, and was surprised to find, at nearly the culmination of a literary life, that he could scarcely turn to literature for comfort or even for reliable information. A literature of illness, he said, barely exists. And so, perhaps, Intoxicated by My Illness deserves praise simply for existing on that slim shelf of books about death and dying that don’t require us to engage in scream therapy or adopt an entirely new worldview or get religion or subscribe to the belief that death is something other than a enormous rip-off. And yet this book is so diminished, in all the senses of the world, so frustratingly low on content. A long short story, which is far from the most interesting thing in the book, takes up a third of its length. Other sections are repetitive and fragmentary. It certainly wasn’t Broyard’s duty to write anything at all about his experience with cancer, dying, the nearness of death, at least not for the public. But he (or his family) chose to publish what he did write. I’m not sorry to have read Intoxicated by My Illness, but the experience made me long for a different Broyard, and that’s perhaps just a way of saying how acutely I feel his absence, in this book and in the world.
April 22, 2009
Anatole Broyard was a literary critic and editor of the New York Times Book Review. When he was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer, he turned his analytic skills and gift with language into observing himself as a fatally ill man.
One of my favorite observations appears in the fourth section of the book, excerpts from Broyard's journal: "I want an untamed, beautiful death. So I think we should have a competition in dying, sort of like Halloween costumes. Isn't there some way to turn dying into some kind of celebration, a birthday to end all birthdays?"
This is a beautiful book, worthy of reading and re-reading. I wish I had copies to give away to family and friends, as they need it.
One of my favorite observations appears in the fourth section of the book, excerpts from Broyard's journal: "I want an untamed, beautiful death. So I think we should have a competition in dying, sort of like Halloween costumes. Isn't there some way to turn dying into some kind of celebration, a birthday to end all birthdays?"
This is a beautiful book, worthy of reading and re-reading. I wish I had copies to give away to family and friends, as they need it.
June 6, 2016
De una clarividencia arrolladora. Más de 4.
March 9, 2022
It's hard to give a guy's last writing 2 stars but I had to force myself to finish it.
There are several things I will take from this book and, had I been in the grips of terminal illness or wrestling with death, I think I would have gained more. Thankfully, I'm not in either one of these situations so I think some things are lost on me. That's o.k. - I don't want to dismiss the importance of this book or his writing.
My biggest takeaways are, instead of counting from birth to death, count down from death to where you are now. If the average age (let's just say) of death is 80, I only have 38 years left on this Earth. If that's not an impetus to live my life more intentionally then I don't know what is.
We did a journaling exercise last night as a family and I shared this revelation. For me, it really reframed the way I'm looking at experiencing the world. The rest of the family did not share my sentiment.
The other takeaway is "being alive when you die". What I gathered from this is Broyard wanted to squeeze out every possible life bit before death. I've talked with my friends and husband about those that don't seem to want more out of life - they are living in a way that seems like they are miserable. This life state does not, for all that I know, seem to exist because of external circumstances but, rather, an internal apathy. Again, from what I can gather. I don't want that. I have the privilege of living in so many great circumstances and it's completely on me to flex that in a positive way.
So...yeah: I had to force myself to finish but I gained some powerful insight from this book. Maybe that deserves 3 stars??
There are several things I will take from this book and, had I been in the grips of terminal illness or wrestling with death, I think I would have gained more. Thankfully, I'm not in either one of these situations so I think some things are lost on me. That's o.k. - I don't want to dismiss the importance of this book or his writing.
My biggest takeaways are, instead of counting from birth to death, count down from death to where you are now. If the average age (let's just say) of death is 80, I only have 38 years left on this Earth. If that's not an impetus to live my life more intentionally then I don't know what is.
We did a journaling exercise last night as a family and I shared this revelation. For me, it really reframed the way I'm looking at experiencing the world. The rest of the family did not share my sentiment.
The other takeaway is "being alive when you die". What I gathered from this is Broyard wanted to squeeze out every possible life bit before death. I've talked with my friends and husband about those that don't seem to want more out of life - they are living in a way that seems like they are miserable. This life state does not, for all that I know, seem to exist because of external circumstances but, rather, an internal apathy. Again, from what I can gather. I don't want that. I have the privilege of living in so many great circumstances and it's completely on me to flex that in a positive way.
So...yeah: I had to force myself to finish but I gained some powerful insight from this book. Maybe that deserves 3 stars??
December 5, 2024
I was on and off reading this for a while and fittingly my dad or step dad had recommended it. The writing give a lot of perspective and I'm glad I finished it.
August 25, 2023
A beautiful sad memoir from the pen of a perfect writer. I could not put this book down. The title essay is permeated with an unsentimental clarity. Unabashedly in love with words, Broyard drops language jokes everywhere: “I understood that living itself had a deadline.� He enjoys the irony of being a critic with a critical illness.
In “Toward a Literature of Illness,� he praises novelists who have tackled the topic—first among them Thomas Mann (a favorite of mine) and Malcolm Lowry—but only Oliver Sacks gets his vote in the nonfiction category. Bernie Siegel, Norman Cousins, Susan Sontag—no one, he says (challenging himself to fill in the gap), writes about “the imaginative life of the sick,� about “how illness transfigures you.�
“The Patient Examines the Doctor� and “Journal Notes� should be required reading in medical school. Broyard refutes the exclusion of a person’s style and soul from this most wondrous and terrible time. We must, he says, have the most beautiful death we can, telling our own unique story to the end. Broyard’s goal was to be alive when he died, and his narrative is proof that he succeeded. His challenges, if taken seriously by the medical system, would help the rest of us to do the same.
In “Toward a Literature of Illness,� he praises novelists who have tackled the topic—first among them Thomas Mann (a favorite of mine) and Malcolm Lowry—but only Oliver Sacks gets his vote in the nonfiction category. Bernie Siegel, Norman Cousins, Susan Sontag—no one, he says (challenging himself to fill in the gap), writes about “the imaginative life of the sick,� about “how illness transfigures you.�
“The Patient Examines the Doctor� and “Journal Notes� should be required reading in medical school. Broyard refutes the exclusion of a person’s style and soul from this most wondrous and terrible time. We must, he says, have the most beautiful death we can, telling our own unique story to the end. Broyard’s goal was to be alive when he died, and his narrative is proof that he succeeded. His challenges, if taken seriously by the medical system, would help the rest of us to do the same.
June 28, 2008
The first half of this book left me bemused. Although Broyard was certainly talking about his illness and thinking about it, he seemed to be surveying it from an 'outside' perspective, wandering around it, giving it a little poke here and there, and then meticulously recording what happened. He examined his cancer as if under a microscope, but he never seemed to connect to the fact that the cancer was in him and threatening him as a person.
However, this changed in one of the longer essays in the book, in which Broyard writes about his father's death. Here, we see an emotional connection. Perhaps this is because it is easier to connect to someone else's pain and death than it is to one's own?
Although throughout, Broyard displays the excellent prose for which he became famous, I think that, for the most past, he was deluding himself if he felt that he was connected to his illness. He may have been enthralled by it, obsessed by it, but to be truly intoxicated, one must first acknowledge that the intoxicating substance is part of your body and is, for the moment, firmly in control.
However, this changed in one of the longer essays in the book, in which Broyard writes about his father's death. Here, we see an emotional connection. Perhaps this is because it is easier to connect to someone else's pain and death than it is to one's own?
Although throughout, Broyard displays the excellent prose for which he became famous, I think that, for the most past, he was deluding himself if he felt that he was connected to his illness. He may have been enthralled by it, obsessed by it, but to be truly intoxicated, one must first acknowledge that the intoxicating substance is part of your body and is, for the moment, firmly in control.
October 30, 2007
Much of this book was taken from Broyard's past essays & personal journals after being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1989. Perhaps the biggest contribution of this book is Broyard's advice to physicians. His perspective as a patient makes for invaluable advice on what a patient's vision of his doctor is and how he would like to be seen by his doctor. For example, his wish not only for a physician but a metaphysician. Particularly touching was his reflections on his father's death in 1948. This is a "good" read, but not stellar. Those who have experienced death and dying close to home will likely relate to many of his thoughts and conclusions on the utter inevitability of it all.
January 19, 2008
This book reminded me of the idea in The Parable of the Talents that creating can keep you alive through anything. The world of modern medicine is a machine, and people die in that machine. The author asks those who care for him in illness and in death, do you understand the significance of who I am in my illness? Is this moment lost on you? Because if it, that seems a violation. It makes me ask myself, how do I stay vibrant enough to really see each sick person that I work with? I did not learn that in school at all, except in the most superficial way.
April 27, 2013
from "What the Cystoscope Said":
"Don't leave me alone," he whispered, "I'm afraid." I put my hand on his. "You're not alone, Pop," I said, "I'm here." His eyes went far away. "I wish I had a hundred of my children here, and their children," he said, "I don't want to be alone."
You want everybody on earth to stop what they're doing and come to say good-bye personally to you. You want humanity to see you off, the way close friends see you off on a boat. The idea of unanimity, two billion people's sympathy, is the only commensurate condolence.
"Don't leave me alone," he whispered, "I'm afraid." I put my hand on his. "You're not alone, Pop," I said, "I'm here." His eyes went far away. "I wish I had a hundred of my children here, and their children," he said, "I don't want to be alone."
You want everybody on earth to stop what they're doing and come to say good-bye personally to you. You want humanity to see you off, the way close friends see you off on a boat. The idea of unanimity, two billion people's sympathy, is the only commensurate condolence.
April 26, 2012
I haven't read all of this book, but I've read two chapters--and it's very bright, witty, insightful writing. The chapter on what he wants from his doctor is wonderful. Every doctor and medical student should read it--but there's probably only one doctor who could make his grade: Oliver Sachs, who write the foreword to the book.
April 14, 2013
En la traducción española, el tÃtulo es "Ebrio de enfermedad". Se trata de un libro increÃble, formado por varios escritos en los que su autor narra la enfermedad que le robarÃa la vida. Lo bueno del libro es que está ausente todo patetismo y solo se ve inteligencia, brillantez e ironÃa. Una maravilla.
April 15, 2013
Brillante.
Porque no existen las enfermedades, sino los enfermos.
Porque no existen las enfermedades, sino los enfermos.
October 7, 2018
The majority of “Intoxicated by My Illness� by Anatole Broyard is an excellent exploration of his grappling with his cancer diagnosis. He got his diagnosis, cancer of the prostrate, in August 1989 and died in October 1990. Being a writer and a critic he was expertly qualified to write on death and do a review of literature. Oliver Sacks, who he names in the book as the doctor he would like to have, writes the Forward.
The last and longest section of the book is the most disturbing. On doing a google search I read in enotes that this is a short story. But nowhere in the book is this indicated. It is his recounting of when his father got his diagnosis and the time between then and his death. In the ‘story� the son rapes his father’s nurse. He intentionally plans his revenge, sets up a date, orders her Bourbon to loosen her up, invites her to his apartment to give her a book, and then forcefully rapes her, and when she is either asleep or unconscious he takes all her clothes off and "pounds" her again. I felt myself get ill reading his plans of seduction. This left me cold, and I do hope this is a story, otherwise we have another prestigious man who got away with rape. His wife pulled together his papers to publish this book so it makes me wonder why it was not clarified if it indeed was a short fictional story, it felt too true and the rest of the book is true.
Other than this story, the book has some excellent quotes and wisdom on a subject we all have to eventually confront in our life:
“Desire itself is a kind of immortality.�
“Storytelling is a natural reaction to illness. People bleed stories—I’ve become a blood bank of stories. Stories are antibodies against illness and pain.
“…there is only the interpretation each doctor and each patient make.�
“A novelist turns his anxiety into a story to control it.�
“Poetry might be defined as language writing itself out of a difficult situation.�
“Therapist Erving Polster defined embarrassment as a radiance that doesn’t know what to do with itself.�
“A critical illness is like a great permission, an authorization or absolving.�
“…a sick person needs other strategies besides medications to help him cope with his illness.�
“Therapeutic value of style�
“Develop a style for illness� only by insisting on your style can you keep from falling out of love with yourself as the illness attempts to diminish or disfigure you.�
“Sometimes your vanity is the only thing that’s keeping you alive, and your style is the instrument of your vanity. It may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminishment of self.�
“How good is this man?� is simply the reverse of “How bad am I?� To be sick brings up all our prejudices and primitive feelings like fear or love it makes us a little crazy. Yet the craziness of the patient is part of his condition.�
“I would hope that my doctor’s authority and his charisma might help to protect me against what the anthropologist Richard Shweder calls “soul loss,� a sense of terrible emptiness, a feeling that your soul has abandoned your ailing body like rats deserting a sinking ship. When your soul leaves, the illness rushes in. I used to get restless when people talked about sould, but now I know better. Soul is the part of you that you summon up in emergencies. As Mr. Shweder points out, you don’t need to be religious to believe in souls or to have one.�
“It is not, Mr. Becker (Ernest Becker is the author of Denial of Death) says, our desire to sleep with our mothers and slay our fathers that drives us but a wish to be our own fathers, to wrest the self from the history of the family and protest it into immortality. We defend ourselves not against castration anxiety but against death a for more absolute castration. How can we achieve immortality? According to Mr. Becker, by becoming so insistently and inimitably ourselves, or by producing something so indelibly our own, that we may be said, as a poet put it, to have added forever to the sum of reality.�
“Quoting Philip Rieff, Mr. Becker describes character as “a restrictive shaping of possibility.� The great problem in life is how much to restrict and how much possibility to risk. There is, Mr. Becker says, “a panic inherent in creation,� and we have to control that panic without tranquilizing it. We have to convert it into usable excitement, what some writers would call creativity.�
Quotes by others:
“We never know what we might find until we’re forced to look.� John Dewey
“Life can only be understood backward.� Kierkegaard
The last and longest section of the book is the most disturbing. On doing a google search I read in enotes that this is a short story. But nowhere in the book is this indicated. It is his recounting of when his father got his diagnosis and the time between then and his death. In the ‘story� the son rapes his father’s nurse. He intentionally plans his revenge, sets up a date, orders her Bourbon to loosen her up, invites her to his apartment to give her a book, and then forcefully rapes her, and when she is either asleep or unconscious he takes all her clothes off and "pounds" her again. I felt myself get ill reading his plans of seduction. This left me cold, and I do hope this is a story, otherwise we have another prestigious man who got away with rape. His wife pulled together his papers to publish this book so it makes me wonder why it was not clarified if it indeed was a short fictional story, it felt too true and the rest of the book is true.
Other than this story, the book has some excellent quotes and wisdom on a subject we all have to eventually confront in our life:
“Desire itself is a kind of immortality.�
“Storytelling is a natural reaction to illness. People bleed stories—I’ve become a blood bank of stories. Stories are antibodies against illness and pain.
“…there is only the interpretation each doctor and each patient make.�
“A novelist turns his anxiety into a story to control it.�
“Poetry might be defined as language writing itself out of a difficult situation.�
“Therapist Erving Polster defined embarrassment as a radiance that doesn’t know what to do with itself.�
“A critical illness is like a great permission, an authorization or absolving.�
“…a sick person needs other strategies besides medications to help him cope with his illness.�
“Therapeutic value of style�
“Develop a style for illness� only by insisting on your style can you keep from falling out of love with yourself as the illness attempts to diminish or disfigure you.�
“Sometimes your vanity is the only thing that’s keeping you alive, and your style is the instrument of your vanity. It may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminishment of self.�
“How good is this man?� is simply the reverse of “How bad am I?� To be sick brings up all our prejudices and primitive feelings like fear or love it makes us a little crazy. Yet the craziness of the patient is part of his condition.�
“I would hope that my doctor’s authority and his charisma might help to protect me against what the anthropologist Richard Shweder calls “soul loss,� a sense of terrible emptiness, a feeling that your soul has abandoned your ailing body like rats deserting a sinking ship. When your soul leaves, the illness rushes in. I used to get restless when people talked about sould, but now I know better. Soul is the part of you that you summon up in emergencies. As Mr. Shweder points out, you don’t need to be religious to believe in souls or to have one.�
“It is not, Mr. Becker (Ernest Becker is the author of Denial of Death) says, our desire to sleep with our mothers and slay our fathers that drives us but a wish to be our own fathers, to wrest the self from the history of the family and protest it into immortality. We defend ourselves not against castration anxiety but against death a for more absolute castration. How can we achieve immortality? According to Mr. Becker, by becoming so insistently and inimitably ourselves, or by producing something so indelibly our own, that we may be said, as a poet put it, to have added forever to the sum of reality.�
“Quoting Philip Rieff, Mr. Becker describes character as “a restrictive shaping of possibility.� The great problem in life is how much to restrict and how much possibility to risk. There is, Mr. Becker says, “a panic inherent in creation,� and we have to control that panic without tranquilizing it. We have to convert it into usable excitement, what some writers would call creativity.�
Quotes by others:
“We never know what we might find until we’re forced to look.� John Dewey
“Life can only be understood backward.� Kierkegaard
April 26, 2021
This is a remarkably beautiful, intimate, authentic little book that you should read if you are deathly ill or if you plan on being deathly ill someday.
Broyard � best known for being a longtime book critic for the New York Times and for being accused in a New Yorker article by Henry Louis Gates of being a Black man “passing� as white � died in 1970 about a year after being diagnosed with a cancer that began in his prostate and had invaded the rest of his body. In that brief interim he wrote the essays in this book, which his wife compiled with an earlier short story Broyard wrote about the death of his father.
In the forward, Oliver Sacks, the doctor and author, lauds Broyard’s ferocity in the face of the reaper: “You feel the man himself ... seize the pen with unprecedented force, determined to challenge his illness, to go into the very jaws of death, fully alive ... He takes his pen almost to the darkness.� With these words Sacks acknowledges the fulfillment of Broyard’s final wish and his reason for writing the book, which to make sure he is alive when he dies.
Indeed, this is Broyard’s message, that dying is the last act of living and we should fully occupy the stage until the final curtain falls. He jumps far beyond Dylan Thomas’s admonition of not going gentle into that good night, urging himself, and the rest of us, to deliver a leaping, careening, cartwheeling, twirling, prancing last performance, a vaudevillian closure of memorable stature. Just as comics know it is best to leave the audience laughing as they exit, Broyard desires to leave the planet while he is still rife with life.
“Being ill and dying is largely, to a great degree, a matter of style,� says Broyard. “My intention is to show people who are ill � and we will all be ill someday � that it’s not the end of their world as they know it, so they can go on being themselves, perhaps even more than before.�
In his march as a dead man walking, Broyard traverses so much of the landscape of dying and death � from the absence of literature on the subject to the abundance of robotic doctors to the indignities of invasive “procedures� � and does so with such wit and erudition that I found myself note-taking on nearly every page. A few of his observations:
* “Illness is primarily a drama, and it should be possible to enjoy it as well as suffer it.�
* “Storytelling seems to be a natural reaction to illness. ... Stories are antibodies against illness and pain.�
* “I would also want a doctor who is not only a talented physician, but a bit of a metaphysician, too. Someone who can treat body and soul. ... When you die, your philosophy dies along with you. So I want a metaphysical man to keep me company.�
* When you’re ill you instinctively fear a diminishment and disfigurement of yourself. It’s that, more than dying, that frightens you.�
The last passage in particular stays with me. Our self-awareness, self-esteem, and self-identification � who we and how we see ourselves � is completely dependent on being alive, on having a functioning body chemistry. It seems to me that none of us can comprehend the finality of death and how completely it erases us. In fact, this lack of comprehension, whether willful or reflexive, is the basis for the industry of religion, which sells us, the doomed, a comforting promise of an afterlife, one in which “we� keep going minus the burden of our unreliable bodies.
Thus far in life I’ve managed to avoid both purchase of that promise and the one-way ticket necessary to see whether it’s bunkum or not. And, since we’ve yet to have anyone report back from the after-party, I’m going to continuing skipping toward oblivion with as much style as I can muster, hoping that Broyard would approve.
Broyard � best known for being a longtime book critic for the New York Times and for being accused in a New Yorker article by Henry Louis Gates of being a Black man “passing� as white � died in 1970 about a year after being diagnosed with a cancer that began in his prostate and had invaded the rest of his body. In that brief interim he wrote the essays in this book, which his wife compiled with an earlier short story Broyard wrote about the death of his father.
In the forward, Oliver Sacks, the doctor and author, lauds Broyard’s ferocity in the face of the reaper: “You feel the man himself ... seize the pen with unprecedented force, determined to challenge his illness, to go into the very jaws of death, fully alive ... He takes his pen almost to the darkness.� With these words Sacks acknowledges the fulfillment of Broyard’s final wish and his reason for writing the book, which to make sure he is alive when he dies.
Indeed, this is Broyard’s message, that dying is the last act of living and we should fully occupy the stage until the final curtain falls. He jumps far beyond Dylan Thomas’s admonition of not going gentle into that good night, urging himself, and the rest of us, to deliver a leaping, careening, cartwheeling, twirling, prancing last performance, a vaudevillian closure of memorable stature. Just as comics know it is best to leave the audience laughing as they exit, Broyard desires to leave the planet while he is still rife with life.
“Being ill and dying is largely, to a great degree, a matter of style,� says Broyard. “My intention is to show people who are ill � and we will all be ill someday � that it’s not the end of their world as they know it, so they can go on being themselves, perhaps even more than before.�
In his march as a dead man walking, Broyard traverses so much of the landscape of dying and death � from the absence of literature on the subject to the abundance of robotic doctors to the indignities of invasive “procedures� � and does so with such wit and erudition that I found myself note-taking on nearly every page. A few of his observations:
* “Illness is primarily a drama, and it should be possible to enjoy it as well as suffer it.�
* “Storytelling seems to be a natural reaction to illness. ... Stories are antibodies against illness and pain.�
* “I would also want a doctor who is not only a talented physician, but a bit of a metaphysician, too. Someone who can treat body and soul. ... When you die, your philosophy dies along with you. So I want a metaphysical man to keep me company.�
* When you’re ill you instinctively fear a diminishment and disfigurement of yourself. It’s that, more than dying, that frightens you.�
The last passage in particular stays with me. Our self-awareness, self-esteem, and self-identification � who we and how we see ourselves � is completely dependent on being alive, on having a functioning body chemistry. It seems to me that none of us can comprehend the finality of death and how completely it erases us. In fact, this lack of comprehension, whether willful or reflexive, is the basis for the industry of religion, which sells us, the doomed, a comforting promise of an afterlife, one in which “we� keep going minus the burden of our unreliable bodies.
Thus far in life I’ve managed to avoid both purchase of that promise and the one-way ticket necessary to see whether it’s bunkum or not. And, since we’ve yet to have anyone report back from the after-party, I’m going to continuing skipping toward oblivion with as much style as I can muster, hoping that Broyard would approve.
July 30, 2022
Intoxicated by My Illness, Anatole Broyard’s brilliant collection of essays on being diagnosed with cancer was published posthumously in 1989. Broyard writes to take possession of his illness, to give it a narrative that he can control (“Writing is the greatest counterpoint to my illness. It forces cancer to go through my character before it can get to me.�) As a longtime editor for The NYT Book Review, he does not miss the irony of being a critic with a critical illness. He writes with admirable optimism in the face of death, instead feeling a renewed desire for life (desire, he says, is the only true form of immortality). And yet, none of these essays enter the territory of becoming overly sentimental or gushy.
One of the best essays, ‘What the Cystoscope Said,� recalls the diagnosis and death of his father from a similar cancer in 1948. In it, he recalls his strained relationship with his father (“My father and I didn’t talk much. We never had. When I was a child, he wouldn’t; when I reached adolescence, I wouldn’t. After that, we were so far apart that we couldn’t have heard each other across the distance.�), and the strange way that illness can bring people together.
If you haven’t heard of Broyard before, he was a complicated character in the literary world in the 60s-80s. I read his memoir, Kafka Was the Rage, on coming of age in 1940s Greenwich Village (where he ran a bookstore on Cornelia Street), but what I want to read next is his daughter Bliss Broyard’s memoir ‘One Drop� (2007) about finding out that her father spent his life ‘passing� as a white man, and reconnecting with her father’s side of the family after his death.
One of the best essays, ‘What the Cystoscope Said,� recalls the diagnosis and death of his father from a similar cancer in 1948. In it, he recalls his strained relationship with his father (“My father and I didn’t talk much. We never had. When I was a child, he wouldn’t; when I reached adolescence, I wouldn’t. After that, we were so far apart that we couldn’t have heard each other across the distance.�), and the strange way that illness can bring people together.
If you haven’t heard of Broyard before, he was a complicated character in the literary world in the 60s-80s. I read his memoir, Kafka Was the Rage, on coming of age in 1940s Greenwich Village (where he ran a bookstore on Cornelia Street), but what I want to read next is his daughter Bliss Broyard’s memoir ‘One Drop� (2007) about finding out that her father spent his life ‘passing� as a white man, and reconnecting with her father’s side of the family after his death.
October 1, 2024
"La mejor medicina para el enfermo es el deseo: el deseo de vivir, de estar con otros, de hacer cosas, de volver a su vida. Cuando estaba interno en el hospital, siempre andaba mirando por la ventana para ver el mundo real, que nunca me habÃa parecido más deseable. Me gustaba sugerir, inventar o imaginar o recordar maneras de mantener vivo el deseo, un modo de mantenerse vivo uno mismo".
Anatole Broyard fue un crÃtico del New York Times al que diagnosticaron de cáncer de próstata bastante joven. Ya habÃa sufrido una experiencia muy cercana con la muerte y el cáncer, su padre murió cuando él era un adolescente. En estos pequeños escritos que realizó estando enfermo, Broyard buscó la forma de mantenerse vivo en su camino a la muerte. Para él las narraciones y el estilo propio eran una forma muy importante de vivir, de sentir el mundo y de poder decir algo sobre él. Su estilo era claro, directo y sin tapujos. Hablaba de la enfermedad y de los médicos de una forma sincera, sin pretender adornarla. Nos enseña sobre medicina desde la perspectiva del paciente y la persona. Las ansias de vida que muestra nos empuja a querer vivir siempre con dignidad y fuerza, hasta el último momento.
"Morir es dejar de ser humanos, deshumanizarse, y a mi entender el lenguaje, el habla, los relatos o narraciones son las formas más eficaces de mantener viva nuestra condición humana. Guardar silencio es, de forma literal, cerrar la tienda de la propia humanidad."
Anatole Broyard fue un crÃtico del New York Times al que diagnosticaron de cáncer de próstata bastante joven. Ya habÃa sufrido una experiencia muy cercana con la muerte y el cáncer, su padre murió cuando él era un adolescente. En estos pequeños escritos que realizó estando enfermo, Broyard buscó la forma de mantenerse vivo en su camino a la muerte. Para él las narraciones y el estilo propio eran una forma muy importante de vivir, de sentir el mundo y de poder decir algo sobre él. Su estilo era claro, directo y sin tapujos. Hablaba de la enfermedad y de los médicos de una forma sincera, sin pretender adornarla. Nos enseña sobre medicina desde la perspectiva del paciente y la persona. Las ansias de vida que muestra nos empuja a querer vivir siempre con dignidad y fuerza, hasta el último momento.
"Morir es dejar de ser humanos, deshumanizarse, y a mi entender el lenguaje, el habla, los relatos o narraciones son las formas más eficaces de mantener viva nuestra condición humana. Guardar silencio es, de forma literal, cerrar la tienda de la propia humanidad."
February 5, 2024
El deseo es por sà mismo una especie de inmortalidad
Abans de tot, he de confessar que els llibres sobre metges i sobretot de pacients m'acostumen a fer bastanta mandra. En aquest recull d'escrits (bastant heterogenis), Anatole Paul Broyard, escriptor del The New York Times i crÃtic literari, repassa la seva relació amb la malaltia oncològica i la mort des de la seva pròpia prespectiva (cà ncer pròstata) i des de la de familiar acompanyant (del seu pare, cà ncer de bufeta).
Hi ha alguna reflexió que és interessant però la resta és bastant just, motiu pel qual suspenc.
¿En qué está pensando mi médico cuando dice que le quedan entre seis y dieciocho meses? Le pregunto por otros pacientes, si ha acertado o no.
¿No habrá alguna manera de convertir la muerte en alguna clase de celebración, un cumpleaños que ponga fin a todos los cumpleaños?
Abans de tot, he de confessar que els llibres sobre metges i sobretot de pacients m'acostumen a fer bastanta mandra. En aquest recull d'escrits (bastant heterogenis), Anatole Paul Broyard, escriptor del The New York Times i crÃtic literari, repassa la seva relació amb la malaltia oncològica i la mort des de la seva pròpia prespectiva (cà ncer pròstata) i des de la de familiar acompanyant (del seu pare, cà ncer de bufeta).
Hi ha alguna reflexió que és interessant però la resta és bastant just, motiu pel qual suspenc.
¿En qué está pensando mi médico cuando dice que le quedan entre seis y dieciocho meses? Le pregunto por otros pacientes, si ha acertado o no.
¿No habrá alguna manera de convertir la muerte en alguna clase de celebración, un cumpleaños que ponga fin a todos los cumpleaños?
October 23, 2022
A fascinating take on disease from the patient's eyes. What challenges me, is his ask of doctors to be, not the solvers of the problem, not the guiding hand, but a storyteller acknowledging his fault for having a disease (totally puzzles me!).
April 5, 2023
Segundo libro que leo este año donde un paciente habla sobre lo difÃcil que es estar enfermo y ver cómo a los lejos la muerte se empieza a acercar. Tiene mucha poesÃa, muchas metáforas hermosas, mucho dolor y mucha lástima
August 20, 2023
Sobre su enfermedad, su próxima muerte trata este libro escrito por un escritor que falleció de un cáncer de próstata. Quiso escribir en sus últimos meses de vida a modo de reflexiones este breve libro.
October 6, 2023
I did not connect with this book. A substantial portion of the narrative covered books and writings by other authors on end of life. The remaining portion was a heartfelt and moving description of his father's death and the always complicated father-son relationship.
December 25, 2017
Brilliant and unique critiques about death and its surrounds
January 23, 2018
Misogynist undertones but some of his descriptions of illness experiences and doctor-patient encounters are so eloquently crafted.
July 20, 2018
A must read for clinicians
October 19, 2018
Absolutely brilliant.
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