Intoxicated By My Illness: And Other Writings on Life and Death [Hardcover]

Anatole Broyard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 12, 1992

The late literary critic, essayist, and columnist offers a collection of essays on illness and dying exploring the ""narrative"" of his own illness, painting a portrait of the kind of doctor everyone wants, and urging others to oppose their illness. 20,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In October 1990 the author, an editor at the New York Times Book Review , died of prostate cancer that had been diagnosed 14 months earlier. During that time he wrote the essays and journal entries that are printed, along with the autobiographical story "What the Cystoscope Said" and earlier pieces on dying from the early 1980s, in this slim, affecting volume. Broyard's unflinching, consistent and somehow credibly upbeat observations of his responses to his illness derive from his belief that he could--must--die with style. Readers familiar with the critic's prose will recognize the sudden startling sentences, the unexpected metaphors with which he claims his last topic: "When the cancer threatened my sexuality, my mind became immediately erect." A valuable record, commemorative as well as brave and trail-blazing.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Writer and New York Times book critic Broyard died of cancer in 1990. Here is a slender volume of writings he produced on the subject of his illness itself, filled out with a handful of earlier pieces on ``The Literature of Death,'' and ending with the grippingly autobiographical short story ``What the Cystoscope Said,'' written by Broyard after his own father's death, also of cancer, in 1948. In 1981, Broyard wrote that ``the vocabulary of death is anticlimactic. It seems that we die in clich‚s.'' In his own struggle with illness and the death that it foreshadowed, however, he summoned up an intellectual rigor that attempted to deny either clich‚ or passivity. ``As a patient I'm a mere beginner,'' he wrote: ``Yet I am a critic, and being critically ill, I thought I might accept the pun and turn it on my condition.'' And so his effort to think his illness into submission begins. ``My intention,'' he writes in a journal entry, ``is to show people who are ill'' that ``[they] can make a game, a career, even an art form of opposing their illness.'' Broyard's own ``art form'' is one, as it always was, that draws on an astonishing breadth of learning and that positively bristles with aphoristic perceptions. ``Soul is the part of you that you summon up in emergencies,'' he writes; and, on doctors and patients: ``The patient is always on the brink of revelation, and he needs an amanuensis.'' This is not Dylan Thomas's raging against the night, but instead the consistent and steady application of the thinking mind against the awful austerities and urgencies of death. ``Writing a book,'' says Broyard, ``would be a counterpoint to my illness. It would force the cancer to go through my character before it can get to me.'' Courageous, vintage Broyard. The trouble is, though, that death was the winner, and the reader is left not with Broyard's ``intoxication,'' but with regret, loss, and a certain chill and ungainly fear. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 135 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter; 1st edition (May 12, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517582163
• ISBN-13: 978-0517582169
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #436,084 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WITH ILLNESS, IT'S EITHER FIGHT OR FLIGHT, January 22, 2000

By 

[e-mail] (CHICAGO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Intoxicated by My Illness (Paperback)

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.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars To be alive when I die, December 21, 2000

By 

Suzanne Rakow (Chico, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Intoxicated by My Illness (Paperback)

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.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dear Doctor, February 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Intoxicated by My Illness (Paperback)

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."