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W. W. Norton & Company
272 pages
Product Description
<p><strong>A searing memoir about devastating illness, creativity, sex and drugs, and thirty-something life in New York.</strong></p>Joshua Cody, a brilliant young composer, was about to receive his PhD when he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. Facing a bone-marrow transplant and full radiation, he charts his struggle: the fury, the tendency to self-destruction, and the ruthless grasping for life and sensation; the encounter with a strange woman on Canal Street that leads to sex at his apartment; the detailed morphine fantasy complete with a bride called Valentina while, in reality, hospital staff are pinning him to his bed. Moving effortlessly between references to <em>Don Giovanni</em> and the Rolling Stones, Ezra Pound and Buffalo Bill, and facsimiles of his own diaries and hospital notebooks, <em>[sic]</em> is a cross between Susan Sontag's <em>Illness as Metaphor</em> and Jay McInerny's <em>Bright Lights, Big City</em>: a mesmerizing, hallucinatory glimpse into a young man's battle against disease and a celebration of art, language, music, and life. 30 black-and-white illustrations