Customer Reviews

Intoxicated by My Illness

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have AIDS, and during the past 10 years I've found that there are really only two ways to approach serious illness: You fight it, or you give in to it. There are times for both. When I want to fight, I re-read Emmanuel Dreuihle's brilliant but out-of-print book "Mortal Embrace," which relentlessly uses the metaphors of war to describe the battle against the enemy unseen. How it energizes me for the battles ahead! But when I am forced to give in, I read "Intoxicated By My Illness" by Anatole Broyard, which offers me a whole new perspective on how to cope with serious illness: Enjoy it! Well, perhaps "enjoy" is to strong a word to describe what Broyard tries to communicate. He calls illness a journey, and he delights in the fact that it brought him back into intimate contact with his otherwise taken-for-granted body. He is fascinated -- even as he is pained -- by what is going on inside of him. He uses the changes in his body to illuminate and strengthen the best parts of his soul. He proves the adage that suffering ennobles, without being self-pitying. He exults in the journey -- he "enjoys" it! -- and that was an entirely new way (for me) to look at illness. He is a kind and gentle and wise writer, and his loss from prostate cancer was a loss to us all ... except for the wisdom he shares in this little book.

These are Anatole Broyard's words and his final wish.

I have never read a book about death that was so uplifting. There is a complete lack of morbidity, self pity, or self indulgence in this writing. I would strongly recommend it for anyone with a life threatening illness. The author's courage in the face of serious illness is daunting. He commits to living the last of his life with even more awareness...a thought that each of us, regardless of health, could employ.

To my doctor . . . and the doctors to whom I will bring my children; who may treat my loved ones in their last illness . . . please read this book. If you don't want to commit to the whole book read the title essay. And then read "The Patient Examines the Doctor." Your response to these essays will be a kind of test I am giving you - an interview technique, as it were, to find out if you are the one I want to be my "familiar in a foreign country."

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-

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.

As a doctor woriking in narrative medicine, I think that this book is one of the best reflections I know on disease and illness.
It is a very precious tool to enhance the comprehension of the patient world.
Absolutely recommended to every narrative and relation centered physician.

prof Giorgio Bert
Torino (Italy)

I stumbled upon this gorgeously poignant book in 1997 while I agonized about the prospect of losing my dad who was dying of pulmonary fibrosis. I believe it was placed in my path, as have so many other books in my life, by the universal guiding force that looks out for each of us, whatever you choose to call it. I had no map, no guidebook on how to deal with my own grief, let alone navigate that tenuous world in which people who know they are dying live. This book helped me to set aside my own feelings so that I could be of the greatest possible service to my dad. If no one ever talks about being sick or dying, how are we to know how to behave?

Little did I know how reading this book was to serve me later on. Eight years after my dad died I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma and underwent chemotherapy. I learned firsthand what Broyard meant when he spoke of how uncomfortable it made him when his friends tiptoed around him and treated him with an exaggerated solicitousness reserved for the pitiful. He was angry, as I recall, and said that if there's one way a healthy person can help someone who's gravely ill it's to treat him simply as a human being. I concur wholeheartedly. Sick people do not want to be pitied, babied, talked down to, lectured, coached, advised, or made to feel like they did something to get sick. They just want to be loved and allowed to have the all terrible emotions that come with the physical, mental, and emotional indignities of illness--rage, self-pity, depression, bitterness, despair. Emotions pass, and like Nietzsche said, that which does not kill me makes me strong. If cancer or some other life-threatening disease doesn't kill you it makes you a wiser, more tolerant, compassionate person. Unfortunately for Broyard it did, but the book he leaves behind is an eloquent tribute to his courage and honesty during his battle, as well as his wisdom in knowing that whenever he didn't do it gracefully that was perfectly ok, too.

As an aside: Broyard mentions Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death" which I bought and read immediately. It's probably had a greater influence on me than any book I've ever read. It had a huge impact on Broyard, too, and he laments the fact that it isn't more widely known. I thank him posthumously for that great gift. Becker's book and Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" have become my holy grail.

Broyard created a poetry of illness if ever there was one. Using his great literary skill and what I'm sure was painfully honest reflection he brought great wisdom and graciousness to the process of dying, for which the living are deeply grateful.