The Wellcome Book Prize asked me if I would like to take part in a blog tour reading one of the six books that had been shortlisted for their 2017 prize. And honestly I almost said no, until I saw what book it was they wanted me to read. The Wellcome Prize celebrates books that further the understanding of medicine - and I’m no biologist, no doctor, no student of sciences - I had assumed it celebrated books that weren’t for the likes of me.
But when I was presented with When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi it gave me pause. This was a book on my radar, and a man I had heard about, who had kindled curiosity within me and a want to read his story.
So I read it. And it was a brilliant book, but one that’s hard to talk to you about. When Breath Becomes Air is the autobiographical recounting of Paul, who has trained all his life to become a become a doctor, and finds out shortly before he graduates, that he has terminal cancer. He speaks with earnestness, and poise, and from a position of unapproachable authority. It’s impossible for me to give some blithe summary without it being obvious as the trite and pale thing is it.
What I can talk about though, is what this book brought forth in me. And why I would ardently recommend others also seek it out and meet with what he has to say.
Firstly, I found meaning in the literary way he writes, heavy with reference. I have had a great many therapists in my time: counsellors and psychiatrists, good ones and bad ones. For me, the best of them spoke of books. And that is the manner in which Paul writes. He curates and quotes; in this book he has become a vessel, long trained and steeped in knowledge through which lived experience has been poured. He specifically talks about that dichotomy, between the academic and the lived-in, between reading and being. He has honed both highly and yet kept them in balance. He has witnessed and himself gone-through the extremes of mortal existence, but what makes this a book, is that he can communicate them, in manners deep and thought-provoking. He writes in the context of what has been written before and quotes Beckett and Eliot as he forms a sentence, bringing forth their ideas and weaving them into a high-level language of their own, asymptotically reaching up towards new levels of understanding.
I should also say, I couldn’t escape the fact that for once in my life I was reading non-fiction. That there was a real person and a real person’s family behind this book. That - by the time I was reading - Paul was two years dead - but that he had really sat down and struggled with what on earth you do when this shattering diagnosis lies at your door. When you have to figure out what to do with what time remains to you, when you don’t know how achingly short that time might be. It burned into me that we all live according to these priorities of an expected lifetime, assuming we will be able to do things in an order that might not present itself.
It’s oft toted, but still true, that repetitive realisation that books about death are really books about life.
In fact ‘books about medicine’ are actually books about life, viewed through yet another lense. In When Breath Becomes Air Paul talks not only of his experience of being a patient, but his experience of being a doctor, of physicality and its interaction with concepts of self, of the role of physician as guide, in making space for life reimagined. The reason this book exists is Paul’s time was short, shorter than it was supposed to be. But he clearly gathered much in that time, and crafted it into a story, a communication, something that espouses on human experience and that is quietly revelatory.
