I found a book astonishingly naive, with all the blessed honesty of a man trying to find out what hit him. A writer struck massively with agonizing and paralyzing cancer at the age of 51 tells of his woes and their transcendence. Mr. Price's book is not like that. He gives us all his pains and humiliations in harrowing, numbing detail. Only when we have gone with him through four years of degradation do we arrive with him at some sense of purpose or benefit.
Sudden catastrophe projects a writer into a fictional space.
He must compose his own new life. This long, painful journey can be completed only when Mr. Price, after four years of surgery, radiation, mind-numbing medication, rehabilitation and intense, untreatable pain, finally learns to stand off from all that he has been and done. You are no longer who you were, you will never be that person again. Then stanch the grief. . . . Find your way to be somebody else, the next viable you.