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3.77 AVERAGE
3.77 AVERAGE
DNF
Could not tolerate his style or tone, nor could I relate to his experience. Not what I’m looking for.
Could not tolerate his style or tone, nor could I relate to his experience. Not what I’m looking for.
“Inside every patient there’s a poet trying to get out.”
To be sure, Anatole Broyard was no shrinking violet. When diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in 1989 he did not “go gentle into that good night,” cowed by fear and anger, but rose up and fought to be heard as he struggled to come to terms with the end of his life. “Intoxicated by My Illness” is the result of that fight, a stunningly eloquent and well-reasoned treatise about how to die, how to treat the dying, and, indirectly, how to live.
Broyard takes his sharp critic’s eye and trains it on the process of dying, examining with careful precision what others have said on the subject and how it relates to his actual experience of the situation (Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, for example, is admirable for her “single-minded dedication,” but said devotion often leads her to be “a bit grotesque”). In his final weeks, Broyard seeks to improve our ‘literature of death,’ so that people will have a greater understanding of the process and, perhaps, will be better equipped when life throws a little curveball their way and they find themselves in a similar situation.
While Broyard’s observations are clear-sighted and deeply profound, to be honest I would have liked to hear more of his own personal reflections. The high points of “Intoxicated by My Illness” are its most confessional moments, when Broyard ponders his own circumstance, how he got to this point, and how he feels about it. His critical studies of death are fascinating and insightful, to be sure, but they almost feel like a shield, a crutch – something to help him avoid the reality of his situation rather than embrace it, as he set out to do. He essentially admits to this when he says that he has turned to what he understands and what he is best at (literature and being a critic, respectively) in order to make the un-knowable abyss he faces more palatable, so in the end you cannot fault him for this minor complaint, and instead you must continue to marvel at his remarkable self-awareness.
“It may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self,” Broyard ponders at one point, and if this is the case then Broyard needn’t have feared at all; in the decline of his life Broyard blossomed and thrived. “I’m going to say something brilliant when I die,” he promises to himself early on, and with “Intoxicated by My Illness” he certainly achieves this lofty goal.
Grade: A-
To be sure, Anatole Broyard was no shrinking violet. When diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in 1989 he did not “go gentle into that good night,” cowed by fear and anger, but rose up and fought to be heard as he struggled to come to terms with the end of his life. “Intoxicated by My Illness” is the result of that fight, a stunningly eloquent and well-reasoned treatise about how to die, how to treat the dying, and, indirectly, how to live.
Broyard takes his sharp critic’s eye and trains it on the process of dying, examining with careful precision what others have said on the subject and how it relates to his actual experience of the situation (Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, for example, is admirable for her “single-minded dedication,” but said devotion often leads her to be “a bit grotesque”). In his final weeks, Broyard seeks to improve our ‘literature of death,’ so that people will have a greater understanding of the process and, perhaps, will be better equipped when life throws a little curveball their way and they find themselves in a similar situation.
While Broyard’s observations are clear-sighted and deeply profound, to be honest I would have liked to hear more of his own personal reflections. The high points of “Intoxicated by My Illness” are its most confessional moments, when Broyard ponders his own circumstance, how he got to this point, and how he feels about it. His critical studies of death are fascinating and insightful, to be sure, but they almost feel like a shield, a crutch – something to help him avoid the reality of his situation rather than embrace it, as he set out to do. He essentially admits to this when he says that he has turned to what he understands and what he is best at (literature and being a critic, respectively) in order to make the un-knowable abyss he faces more palatable, so in the end you cannot fault him for this minor complaint, and instead you must continue to marvel at his remarkable self-awareness.
“It may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self,” Broyard ponders at one point, and if this is the case then Broyard needn’t have feared at all; in the decline of his life Broyard blossomed and thrived. “I’m going to say something brilliant when I die,” he promises to himself early on, and with “Intoxicated by My Illness” he certainly achieves this lofty goal.
Grade: A-