When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi, 2016
Memoir & biography Politics & societyPhilosophyPopular science
A neurosurgeon's memoir of literature, medicine and mortality, written as his own life was ending. A lyrical, witty voice moves through grief, memory and wonder at a steady, reflective pace.
Feels like grief, wonder and hope. About memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you are drawn to memoirs that think about medicine, literature and mortality together. The cancer at its center makes for heavy, grief-soaked reading, and the clinical passages can feel dense.
Why read it
It offers a surgeon's exact language and a writer's wonder, showing how one person faced mortality while still living.
A page from the book
What it feels like to leave a small town at escape velocity.
I knew with certainty that I would never be a doctor. I stretched out in the sun, relaxing on a desert plateau just above our house. My uncle, a doctor, like so many of my relatives, had asked me earlier that day what I planned on doing for a career, now that I was heading off to college, and the question barely registered. If you had forced me to answer, I suppose I would have said a writer, but frankly, thoughts of any career at this point seemed absurd. I was leaving this small Arizona town in a few weeks, and I felt less like someone preparing to climb a career ladder than a buzzing electron about to achieve escape velocity, flinging out into a strange and sparkling universe. Paul Kalanithi.Kalanithi wrote most of this memoir while dying of lung cancer; it was published posthumously in 2016 and became a bestseller.
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Questions readers ask
- Is When Breath Becomes Air for me?
- You may like it if you are drawn to memoirs that think about medicine, literature and mortality together. The cancer at its center makes for heavy, grief-soaked reading, and the clinical passages can feel dense.
- What is When Breath Becomes Air like?
- A lyrical, witty voice moves through grief, memory and wonder at a steady, reflective pace. Feels like grief, wonder and hope. About memory.
- What should I read after When Breath Becomes Air?
- If you liked When Breath Becomes Air, try Wild (Cheryl Strayed), Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert) and Girl, Interrupted (Susanna Kaysen).
A taste of the feed
The wilderness grief leaves you in, and the years it takes to walk out.
It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again. To be the woman my mother raised. To remember how she said honey and picture her particular gaze. I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn’t know where I was going until I got there.
Wild · Cheryl Strayed
There is a kind of crying that only happens where nobody can hear it.
Everything else about the three-years-ago scene was different, though. That time, I was not in Rome but in the upstairs bathroom of the big house in the suburbs of New York which I’d recently purchased with my husband. It was a cold November, around three o’clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and—just as during all those nights before—I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.
Eat, Pray, Love · Elizabeth Gilbert
Somewhere along the way, the ordinary laws stopped applying.
But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening? In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down1 a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest1 and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces, flowers.
Girl, Interrupted · Susanna Kaysen
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