A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing
Novelist and poet Reynolds Price ( A Long and Happy Life ) here manages to turn his battle with spine cancer into a tough, sometimes funny, always moving and optimistic tale. His writing is eloquent enough to encompass his worst anguish; but his intellectual rigor, combined with religious convictions that never desert him, precludes self pity. Price now cheerfully calls himself "a certified gimp, in working order." He was first diagnosed in 1984 and during the next four years had surgery, suffered continual and severe pain and became permanently confined to a wheelchair: "My whole body felt caught in the threads of a giant hot screw and bolted inward to the point of screaming." He was heavily drugged and unable to function as either a writer or a friend. In 1987, he began treatment with hypnotist Patrick Logue of Duke University's psychiatric department with remarkable results: "I instantly knew I was free in a way I'd never felt before in my life, surely not for a moment of the past three years." Price learned from Logue to manage his pain without drugs and is writing again: fiction, essays, movie and TV scripts and the affecting poems here. His book is for all who suffer. Through it, with utter simplicity, threads a testament to the power of prayer, which Price calls "the first strong prop beneath my own collapse." He concludes "I've lead a mainly happy life," and, more astonishingly, "I know that this new life is better for me." What higher praise is there than to say we believe him?Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.