Reading Vertically and Tangentially

Hooked on Linwood Barclay now and since my last posting, have read two more of his books: No Time for Goodbye and Fear the Worst. Barclay's murder mysteries are scary. All the more so since they all are found in the mundane, routine of a settled family, a seemingly settled family where the children or parents disappear, where the protagonist is always the prime suspect, and where family secrets always are the source of criminal motives. His writing style is fast paced, modern but on edge making the lead character frantic. Once I remember how to do it, I will link to Barclay's website.

I also like the fact that his stories are set in the Northeast, either Connecticut or New York, with action moving along the Thruway or up and down the Hudson River. I have a feeling I might have read something by him a year or so ago, but I am now a dedicated fan.

Today, in about an hour or so, I read Intoxicated by My Illness by Anatole Broyard, the former editor of the New York Times Book Review. My motivation was a call from the hospital to report a questionable reading of my annual MRI and the need to come for more diagnostic tests immediately. Coincidentally, my chemotherapist had briefed me on the incidents of false positive MRIs, but even that caution could not put 24 hours of fear and dread to rest. (Thankfully, it appears to have been a false positive, but with a complete lack of beside manner, the technician only said "there is nothing we can biopsy today, come back in four to six months.")
A reprieve. Cancer is like bittersweet roots -- despite all the weeding I do in the gardens, it always comes back.

And using that as my meager metaphor, lead to Broyard's book. When he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer wrote several essays about dealing with his disease through the need of humans to tell stories, to set up metaphors and to reflect on other literature as defining his reactions.

"I am 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."

That quote reminded me of the essay I wrote and sent to one of the Slackers who was then taking a fiction writing class. Her assignment was to write about herself in the voice of someone else. I decided to try to do that and sent my effort to her. I wrote as if I were the head nurse at the chemotherapist's office when I went into full-blown allergic shock to my first 15 cc's of Taxol. I wrote as though this nurse so through my guise of being a "good" patient because she had seen so many others and their "patient" facades. Broyard makes me remember the poses I assumed.

Not wanting to make this depressing, because it is not, Broyard makes it real and his first person singular approach, like Didion's in A Year of Magical Thinking, hits everyone who has gone through a bout, or two with cancer: "What goes through your mind when you're lying, full of nuclear dye, under a huge machine that scans ... for evidence of treason? There's a horror-movie appeal to this machine. Beneath it you come the Frankenstein monster exposed to the electric storm? How do you appear to yourself when you sit ...beneath a scanty cotton gown in a hospital waiting room? Nobody, not even a lover, waits as intensely as a critically ill patient." MRI's are miserable for me. I am on my stomach, hanging into holes big enough for Pamela Anderson, with a horribly painful IV jammed into one of the few remaining visible veins on my right hand. And today with the sonogram, I kept waiting for a heart beat, remembering that sound from the fetal ultrasounds for the boys, and feeling it was only dead tissue the technician was finding since I couldn't hear it.

Broyard's cancer is the male equivalent to my bouts of breast and uterine cancer and his ruminations of the effect of his former sex life rang true: "Somebody other than a doctor ought to write about the relation between ... cancer and sexuality ... It's not unusual for the patient to think that it's sex that is killing him and to go back over his amatory history for clues. And of course this is splendid material for speculation, both lyrical and ironical. " His delving on this topic goes on, deliciously so, and can be an apt teaser to read his book.

Running in the opposite direction of the "encouragement" I wanted to give a former co-worker who has been diagnosed at Stage 3, when I told her to come to the conclusion it was not her fault, Broyard comments: "If you reflect that you probably helped to bring your illness on yourself by self-indulgence or by living intensely, you own up to it, instead of blaming something vague and unsatisfactory like fate. Anger is too monolithic for such a delicate situation. It's like a catheter inserted in your soul, draining your spirit." Why couldn't I tell her the most real analysis and conclusion: "... whatever I did, it was worth it. I have no complaints in that direction. I wouldn't change a thing, even if I had known what was coming."

What I find disturbing about Broyard's determination to die with style and to maintain his vanity is knowing how difficult it is to keep up a pose, the pose of the woman who can take it all, who has lived only to make her family a perfect home, who can make a facade of health and stability through weight loss, hair dye and fashion. Broyard avoids such accouterments, although he does emphasize that our dying is an image retained by our survivors.

Finally, Broyard acknowledges a deadly disease changes the perspective of time, from not reckoning our age by counting from birth forward, but from death backwards. From this angle, the ledger of life experience are full and appreciated. Although not hinting at a bucket list, this perspective also encourage optimizing new experiences and savoring them. IBNI becomes the third leg in my milking stool of life, along with Didion's AYOMT and Orianna Fallachi's Letter to an Unborn Child. Each resonates with inevitable human experiences with death, of a child, spouse and one's own. Each tells the reader how best to live.