One Hundred Autobiographies
A Memoir
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery.
This "fake memoir," as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.
Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. Dostoyevsky shows up, as does Graham Greene. Keith Richards and Patti Hansen put in an appearance, Edith Piaf sings, Clint Eastwood saves the neighborhood, and the Rat Pack comes along for the ride. These and other avatars of popular culture help Lehman to make sense of his own mortality and life story.
One Hundred Autobiographies reveals a stunning portrait of a mind against the ropes, facing its own extinction, surviving and enduring.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and critic Lehman (Poems in the Manner of...), who was treated for bladder cancer in 2014, brilliantly captures the despair, uncertainty, and anger he felt in these 100 short reflections on life, death, and writing. Likening his ordeal to the plot of a novel, he declares, "the road connecting memory and desire is not linear... one lesson of any brush with death is that time is finite." He muses on why he writes: "I write to assert my will to live. To prove I exist." Throughout, he reflects on literature and pop culture figures to tell his story: arriving at the hospital for treatment wearing his fedora, Lehman recalls the movie Some Came Running and Dean Martin's hat, "which he wears even in bed, even in a hospital bed." After reading John Milton's Paradise Lost, Lehman ponders the concept of evil: "the real question is not whether you believe in god as such but whether you believe there is such a thing as evil." In his final reflection, being in excellent health though, like many cancer patients, he acknowledges that this might just be a reprieve he advises that "even on bad days, there are pleasant hours," and "it is amazing how much pain the body can withstand." Lehman's exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain.
