Time on Fire
My Comedy of Terrors
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- €6.99
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- €6.99
Publisher Description
Based on Evan Handler’s hit off-Broadway play (called by The New York Times “laceratingly funny and self-revealing”), Time on Fire is a remarkable memoir of illness and survival, love and hope—shot through with anger, humor, and piercing eloquence.
Evan Handler was twenty-four and already an accomplished actor when he was diagnosed with acute leukemia and told that his chances for survival were slim. Resigning his role in Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues, Handler checked into New York Memorial’s Cancer Center and began a bizarre, sometimes uproarious five-year journey in and out of hospitals—“a raucous rump through Hell”—only to face an equally arduous return to the life he left behind.
Time on Fire is the story of Handler’s passage into a twilight world: a place of lonely, haunting despair lit by moments of exultation and hilarity; a world where the truly horrible and the hysterically funny not only coexist but seem to become the same thing. Told with the trenchant humor of a survivor, it takes a wry, unflinching look at the absurdity of fighting for life in a place where death is what is most expected, and a health care system on the brink of madness. It is the story of refusing to succumb to the pressures of conformity that threatened his recovery and of the fierce struggle to find the road back to health—at all costs.
From the comic accounts of his trip to a Madison Avenue sperm bank (“Nothing but the best address for my progeny”) and his experimentation with psychic healing, to the portrayal of the unraveling effects of his illness on his family and girlfriend, Handler records with astonishing precision the full emotional range of his experience. The result is a bracing, achingly poignant account of his determination to steal time and reclaim life. Glowing with uncommon insights and uncompromising honesty, Time on Fire is a testament to the bravery and the endurance of the human spirit.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While some adaptations from theater go limp as prose, Handler has expanded his off-Broadway play about surviving leukemia into a captivating memoir. Laced with anger, punctuated by humor and fueled by his indomitable will to survive, Handler's story is entertaining, harrowing and ennobling. A successful actor, at 24 he was forced to face his mortality. He provides gimlet-eyed portraits of an often uncaring (yet sometimes deeply loving) medical world and the ugly procedures he must undergo. To survive, Handler learned ``opportunistic optimism,'' drawing on inspirational literature, even consulting a psychic, all the while aided by his girlfriend, Jackie. He's forced to confront his family's craziness and his own emotional traumas. He can find humor in retelling his predicament--as in describing hospital sex--while his accounts of the mental bargains he and other patients make suggest a reckoning with ultimates. Readers will be appalled at instances of the often substandard medical treatment he receives and spellbound by his attempts to monitor his recovery. Considering himself ``one of the very luckiest of the unluckiest people,'' Handler speaks with a fresh voice that is entirely riveting. Author tour.
