literatetexan's review against another edition
4.0
A collection of essays and journal notes written by a man dying of cancer. Also includes a short story about the death of his father. Extraordinarily well-written. Beautiful prose.
damsorrow's review against another edition
3.0
I generally don't think about how I was a gender studies major in college except when reading books like this where I'm trying VERY HARD to really get into it and then I start SEEING HOW HE HATES WOMEN and I really and truly am TRYING to enjoy it but then i can't STOP seeing the misogyny and then I am still TRYING but all that happens is I pull out "Jesus fuckin' fuck, what the fuck is this guy's fucking problem with women?"
Good book. Hates girls and probably poors. That's it.
Good book. Hates girls and probably poors. That's it.
carolinexmason's review against another edition
4.0
Intoxicated by My Illness, Anatole Broyard’s brilliant collection of essays on being diagnosed with cancer was published posthumously in 1989. Broyard writes to take possession of his illness, to give it a narrative that he can control (“Writing is the greatest counterpoint to my illness. It forces cancer to go through my character before it can get to me.”) As a longtime editor for The NYT Book Review, he does not miss the irony of being a critic with a critical illness. He writes with admirable optimism in the face of death, instead feeling a renewed desire for life (desire, he says, is the only true form of immortality). And yet, none of these essays enter the territory of becoming overly sentimental or gushy.
One of the best essays, ‘What the Cystoscope Said,’ recalls the diagnosis and death of his father from a similar cancer in 1948. In it, he recalls his strained relationship with his father (“My father and I didn’t talk much. We never had. When I was a child, he wouldn’t; when I reached adolescence, I wouldn’t. After that, we were so far apart that we couldn’t have heard each other across the distance.”), and the strange way that illness can bring people together.
If you haven’t heard of Broyard before, he was a complicated character in the literary world in the 60s-80s. I read his memoir, Kafka Was the Rage, on coming of age in 1940s Greenwich Village (where he ran a bookstore on Cornelia Street), but what I want to read next is his daughter Bliss Broyard’s memoir ‘One Drop’ (2007) about finding out that her father spent his life ‘passing’ as a white man, and reconnecting with her father’s side of the family after his death.
One of the best essays, ‘What the Cystoscope Said,’ recalls the diagnosis and death of his father from a similar cancer in 1948. In it, he recalls his strained relationship with his father (“My father and I didn’t talk much. We never had. When I was a child, he wouldn’t; when I reached adolescence, I wouldn’t. After that, we were so far apart that we couldn’t have heard each other across the distance.”), and the strange way that illness can bring people together.
If you haven’t heard of Broyard before, he was a complicated character in the literary world in the 60s-80s. I read his memoir, Kafka Was the Rage, on coming of age in 1940s Greenwich Village (where he ran a bookstore on Cornelia Street), but what I want to read next is his daughter Bliss Broyard’s memoir ‘One Drop’ (2007) about finding out that her father spent his life ‘passing’ as a white man, and reconnecting with her father’s side of the family after his death.
jenniechantal's review against another edition
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.
supposedlyfun's review
5.0
“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-
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