something about Roger Ebert's autobiography "Life Itself"

Roger Ebert was a talented, Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic and writer who worked for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he and Gene Siskel, film critic for rival paper Chicago Tribune, began co-hosting a weekly movie review show in Chicago. The no-frills program was picked up for national syndication and eventually moved to commercial network television. The odd couple—plump, mop-haired Roger wearing glasses next to tall, thin Gene—having tense, insightful arguments and giving thumbs-up/thumbs-down movie reviews became a pop-culture phenomenon in the 1980s and 90s. After 53-year-old Siskel died in 1999, Ebert continued the show format with other critics.

Ebert was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands in 2002, and his treatment and surgeries later led to the removal of his lower jaw. Ebert, disfigured and no longer able to speak, continued to write, and his blog attracted a loyal audience. He reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and was on TV for 31. Ebert was 70 when he died.

His patient, careful autobiography, Life Itself, is traditional and lovely. Ebert describes his parents, his childhood (including Catholic school), his career, his alcoholism (and then his pain-killer addition during cancer treatments), and his relationships, including the close, competitive relationship he had with Siskel. Ebert's writing about his disfigurement and condition is touching. I also enjoyed reading his views on the evolution of film promotion over the years and his descriptions of his interviewing habits.

 

Read some of his interviews:

• "Who's gonna get me a beer?" An interview with Lee Marvin by Roger Ebert, October 10, 1970
• Interview with George Peppard by Roger Ebert, February 18, 1968
• Interview with John Wayne (1969) by Roger Ebert, June 29, 1969

And one passage early in the autobiography sneaks in this gut-punch.

The optometrist had me read the charts and slowly straightened up. "Has Roger ever worn glasses?" he asked my mother. "No. He hasn't needed them." The doctor said: "He's probably always needed them. He's very shortsighted." He wrote me out a prescription. "Wasn't he ever tested?" It had never occurred to anyone. My parents and my aunt Martha the nurse monitored my health, which was good; I was in the hospital only twice, to have my tonsils and appendix removed, and had monthly radiation treatments for ear infections (they were probably responsible for the salivary cancer I developed in my sixties.) I'd never complained about eyesight, and no one noticed any problems.

Life Itself was published in 2011.

something about going to Tulsa

Mr. Barnes,

I went to Tulsa once, more than 25 years ago, to visit my sister. She and her husband had just moved there so he could die near where he was born. He was diagnosed with cancer a few months into the marriage. The last time I saw him, he was in a hospital bed in Dallas, and his head was deformed and exploding with his disease. That visit was goodbye.

A few weeks later, I was pulled out of Spanish class so my family could join my widowed sister's side. I rode to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the back seat of my other sister's boyfriend's coupe—a Camaro. I felt the giddiness, nervousness, and melancholy one feels when one doesn't know what else to feel. But the mood in the Camaro was fine, with my other sister and her boyfriend magnetically alive and well. They seemed happy. Those two had great chemistry, like cocaine and alcohol.

In Tulsa, we found my parents, who had arrived from Dallas to console the inconsolable. My sister, 22, tragic, had been living with death in a strange city, and now death left her alone in that house. So she grieved, and we offered our presence as comfort. Little did I understand of sadness and grief.

something about "Death Be Not Proud" by John Gunther

John Gunther was a successful journalist and author. Death Be Not Proud is called a memoir, but Gunther himself acknowledges in the foreword that this is really a relatively brief journal that documents his 18-year-old son's fast and fatal struggle with cancer--a brain tumor.

Johnny, Gunther's son, was a bright young man who had every opportunity in front of him. This precocious young man was attending a private academy and was destined for Harvard when he lost a summer feeling tired and with a pain in his neck. Quickly diagnosed with a brain tumor, the prognosis was grim from day one. Hopeful moments erased points in this timeline of struggle. Johnny, with what sounds like a mix of naivete and courage, stayed motivated, eager to keep up with the academic, promising life he had been living.

Johnny sounds like a brilliant blue-blooded young man. His precociousness, as represented in his father's biographizing, is a bit rich. Nevertheless, how can your heart not ache a little when reading lines like this, describing the difference between a son's relationship with his mother versus what he has with his father:

She read him poetry on meditative and religious themes, and he made his own anthology of poems he liked by reciting them into a transcribing apparatus, and then playing them back when the mood was on him. Here, too, the sharp demarcation he made between Frances and me, based on his solicitude for us, became manifest. With Frances he talked of Death often; with me, almost never.

about "[sic]" by Joshua Cody

 
When he was about to receive his doctorate, doctors diagnosed noted young composer Joshua Cody with an aggressive cancer. The memoir-ish [sic] documents without form Cody's life and death struggle; hold the book in your hands, open to just about any page, and be treated to some trivia or personal revelation or philosophical reflection. This nonlinear form was well received by a lot of critics. Not all readers will agree.

I recognize the stakes were profound and, for that, a reader can indulge his author; but Cody really challenged my limits. I got bored and lost interest in Cody's scrapbook of a memoir. The value of this book, for me, anyway, is that, if you're not into "reading" lately, you can keep this book around for a week or so and poke around in it as you wait for sleep.

How can I write this about a memoir written by a dying man? I wait for sleep. Not everyone else does.

briefly about "Mortality" by Christopher Hitchens

British-American author and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 2010 and died December 2011. Mortality is his final work, a meandering collection of essays penned during his painful physical decline. Mentally and emotionally, however, judging by this book, Hitchens stayed the picture of health. In these pages he imparts the experience of dying slowly, offers up a couple memories and lessons learned, and renews his atheism. Hitchens subtly urges us to appreciate health--our speaking voice, in particular. And, about that health, he aims to disabuse us of the idea that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. This last point is not to say that Hitchens regrets his steady flow of cigarettes, scotch, wine, and the late nights he spent with friends; it just seems that life--his especially--necessitates many loosely calculated risks. In the way of an end-of-life perspective, he writes,

So we are left with something quite unusual in the annals of unsentimental approaches to extinction: not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died.

My man

He always cuts briskly through the office, efficient and determined. Like a man who just learned his plane started boarding at a different gate some 150 feet away. He looks together, but he dresses nicely, which only feeds my suspicion that he's a wreck. Today, dark gray wool pants and maroon shirt. Long sleeves, naturally. Like all the men in his family, he prefers stalls to urinals. Now, picture a cell buried in the flesh around his armpit; this is where cancer slumbers through the day. Some 3000 days from now, just after sipping the last of the coffee, seated in his kitchenette, it will wake and begin its spill through the lymphatic vessels. He will regret nothing.

Abuse your illusions

In addition to events in your personal life, this year's Carrier IQ story and revelations about mental illness and its treatment show that everything that seems good is actually bad. And if not actually, then eventually. But that won't change anything.

(Taking the Carrier IQ story to its logical conclusion, in the not-too-distant future we'll have contact lens computer screens. Soon after that, thoughts can be harvested and stored on Google servers. Then thoughts will be stored on a centralized, searchable database. Scary!)

Happy New Year!