My Year Off : Recovering Life After a Stroke
- Book Review,
by ROBERT MCCRUM
Amazon.com
On July 28, 1995, Robert McCrum suffered a severe stroke at the age of 42. His thoughtful memoir chronicles the long, arduous process of recovery. Drawing on his own diaries and those of his wife, Sarah Lyall (then the publishing columnist for the New York Times), McCrum presents a detailed portrait of the physical and psychological effects of a stroke. His speech was impaired and his left arm and leg were paralyzed, but almost worse was the emotional havoc those disabilities wrought. As the hard-driving, hard-living editor of English publishing house Faber & Faber, McCrum had defined himself for 20 years by what he did--now he was forced to ask himself who he was. He ruefully admits that his upbringing in the privileged British upper-middle class, traditionally suspicious of introspection, had ill prepared him for such a struggle, and he pays loving tribute to his American spouse's crucial role in his recovery. (Indeed, the excerpts from Lyall's diaries, which honestly reveal doubt, fear, and anger, are among the book's most moving sections.) Famous friends like Salman Rushdie and Michael Ondaatje make appearances at McCrum's London hospital bedside, but Lyall is the narrative's heroine, and the hard-working staff of physical and speech therapists the invaluable supporting players. The author's lucid explanation of stroke's medical aspects and thorough account of his slow progress toward nearly full recovery will inform and inspire other stroke victims, but at heart this is a touching marital love story and an exciting drama of personal rebirth. --Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
McCrum (The Story of English), editor-in-chief of the British publisher Faber & Faber, was 42 years old and newly married when, one night in the summer of 1995, he suffered a massive stroke that almost killed him. This account of how that night changed his life, told with a skillful blend of candor, humor and comprehensible medical reportage, is not only an enthralling read but also calls attention to the little-known fact that strokes, normally thought of as an affliction of the elderly, attack younger people with remarkable frequency. As it turned out, McCrum was lucky; he almost entirely regained the use of his limbs, although he has a sluggish arm and tires easily. His personality also changed, from hard-driving and aggressive to reflective and relaxed. His marriage to Sarah Lyall, who, when he met her (at the Frankfurt Book Fair) was the New York Times publishing correspondent, obviously helped enormously in his recovery. Some of the most touching segments in the book are excerpts from Lyall's journals of dealing with her husband's slow recovery and his own thoughts on his sometimes harsh and bitter behavior as he strove to regain his life. The book offers solace to those similarly afflicted and is also a moving human document that, because of its protagonist, will be of particular interest to those in the book business. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Stroke is often considered an old person's illness, yet on the morning of July 29, 1995, 42-year-old McCrum, one of Britain's most successful editors and recently married to New York Times reporter Sarah Lyall, woke up paralyzed on his left side. For the rest of that horrible day McCrum struggled to reach a phone to get help. This nightmarish episode was recently excerpted in the New Yorker, and now we have McCrum's full account of the year he spent recuperating from the stroke's physical and emotional devastation. Unfortunately, it's a disappointment; a compelling article doesn't always make a good book. Too often it feels padded; large chunks of his and his wife's diaries are reprinted here; and, surprisingly, the writing leaves the reader emotionally uninvolved, unlike other accounts like Jean-Dominque Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (LJ 5/15/97) and Jimmy Breslin's I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me (LJ 7/96). Still, despite its very British tone (only U.K. stroke organizations are listed), McCrumb's memoir has value for younger stroke victims and their families.-?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Abraham Verghese
With its lucid, heartfelt prose, "My Year Off" gives voice to the millions of people who suffer from strokes.
USA Today, Ann Prichard, 12 November 1998
The reader quickly becomes engaged and eager for the outcome: Will McCrum walk, work, make love, conceive a child, regain his gift for language, drive a car or even walk to the mailbox again? The memoir is no malady-of-the-week downer. It is good reading for anyone who thinks about or has an illness, or is a care-giver, or who ponders change and the meaning of a meaningful life.
From Booklist
A message on a poster in a midwestern hospital warns, "A stroke is a brain attack," and in smaller type is a list of symptoms of a condition that affects nearly 500,000 Americans each year. Across the Atlantic, one of 1995's more notable stroke victims was 42-year-old McCrum, then Faber & Faber's editor in chief, now literary editor of the Observer of London. McCrum--who collaborated with Robert MacNeil on The Story of English (1993, paper) and has written several novels--was also a newlywed, recently married to Sarah Lyall, a reporter in the New York Times' London bureau. McCrum's book is the tale of his stroke: the psychological, philosophical, and physical challenges of convalescence and (in excerpts from diaries McCrum and Lyall maintained) the terrors and hopes, weaknesses and strengths of two people who chose to make a life together. The book should appeal to stroke victims and those interested in how people cope with serious illness, as well as avid book people (McCrum's bedside visitors include notables such as Salman Rushdie). Mary Carroll
Review
"A meticulous and highly literate account, written by a good storyteller--.A book difficult to lay aside until its final sentence has been reached."
--Sherwin B. Nuland (author of How We Die), The New York Times
"Elevating the health-book genre to art is My Year Off. Here's proof a book can delight as it heals"
--The Wall Street Journal
"Lucid, heartfelt . . . a testament to the parallel trials and the courage of the family members of stroke victims."
--Abraham Verghese, The New York Times Book Review
"Good reading for anyone who thinks about or has an illness . . . or who ponders change and the meaning of a meaningful life."
--USA Today
"McCrum eloquently recounts the year of rage, depression, and small victories that has finally left him facing the future with determination and grace."
--Seattle Times
Review
"A meticulous and highly literate account, written by a good storyteller--.A book difficult to lay aside until its final sentence has been reached."
--Sherwin B. Nuland (author of How We Die), The New York Times
"Elevating the health-book genre to art is My Year Off. Here's proof a book can delight as it heals"
--The Wall Street Journal
"Lucid, heartfelt . . . a testament to the parallel trials and the courage of the family members of stroke victims."
--Abraham Verghese, The New York Times Book Review
"Good reading for anyone who thinks about or has an illness . . . or who ponders change and the meaning of a meaningful life."
--USA Today
"McCrum eloquently recounts the year of rage, depression, and small victories that has finally left him facing the future with determination and grace."
--Seattle Times
Book Description
Four years ago, Robert McCrum -- 42 years old, newly married, and at the top of Britain's publishing world -- awoke to find himself totally paralyzed on the left side. In the weeks to come, McCrum would have to face harsh realites: His life was irrevocably changed by a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and medical science could neither pinpoint the cause nor offer any guarantee of recovery. My Year Off poignantly traces McCrum's frustrations and inspirations as he faces an incomprehensible battle of recovery. Interspersed with excerpts from the journals he and his wife kept, and now featuring a poignant afterword on the tremendous reader response McCrum has received, My Year Off reflects the remarkable power of love to heal the body and soul.
From the Publisher
"My Year Off" has been chosen by "Publisher's Weekly" as one of their Best Books of the Year for 1998.
From the Inside Flap
On the morning of July 29, 1995, Robert McCrum--forty-two-years old, newly married, at the top of his profession as one of British publishing's most admired editors, and in what he thought was the full bloom of health--awoke to find himself totally paralyzed on the left side, the victim of a stroke brought on by a massive cerebral hemorrhage. In My Year Off, McCrum takes readers through his own education about strokes and the frustrating reality that medical science can neither pinpoint the cause of his stroke nor offer any guarantee of recovery. He poignantly writes about his life being irrevocably changed, and, in a new afterword, how his book has touched others. McCrum's recovery is beset by anger and depression, but also marked by the love of his wife, Sarah Lyall, a love that proves equal to their dismaying circumstances. With excerpts from both their journals sprinkled throughout, My Year Off is much more than a story of recovery: It is a love story of the most realistic--and hence, inspiring--kind.
From the Back Cover
"A meticulous and highly literate account, written by a good storyteller--.A book difficult to lay aside until its final sentence has been reached."
--Sherwin B. Nuland (author of How We Die), The New York Times
"Elevating the health-book genre to art is My Year Off. Here's proof a book can delight as it heals"
--The Wall Street Journal
"Lucid, heartfelt . . . a testament to the parallel trials and the courage of the family members of stroke victims."
--Abraham Verghese, The New York Times Book Review
"Good reading for anyone who thinks about or has an illness . . . or who ponders change and the meaning of a meaningful life."
--USA Today
"McCrum eloquently recounts the year of rage, depression, and small victories that has finally left him facing the future with determination and grace."
--Seattle Times
About the Author
Robert McCrum, now literary editor of London's Observer, was the editor-in-chief of the publishing firm Faber & Faber in London for nearly twenty years. He has authored six highly acclaimed novels and is the coauthor of the bestselling The Story of English. McCrum lives in London with his wife, Sarah Lyall, and their daughter.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Wo aber Gefahr, wacht das Rettende auch.
(Where danger waits, salvation also lies.)
--Friedrich Hölderlin
When I was just forty-two I suffered a severe stroke. Paralysed on my left side and unable to walk, I was confined to a hospital for three months, then spent about a year recovering, slowly getting myself back into the world.
When I was seriously ill in hospital, I longed to read a book that would tell me what I might expect in convalescence and also give me something to think about. There are many books about strokes in old age, but I was young and had been vigorous and there was nothing that spoke to me in my distress.
I have written this book ot help those who have suffered as I did, and indeed for anyone recovering from what doctors call "an insult to the brain". I've also written it for families and loved ones who, sucked into the vortex of catastrophic illnes, find themselves searching for words of encouragement and explanation. People express every kind of sympathy for stroke-sufferers, but the carers are often the forgotten ones. To all concerned, this book is meant to send a ghostly signal across the dark universe of ill-health that says, "You are not alone." It's also intended to show those of us who are well what it can be like when our bodies shut down in the midst of the lives we take for granted. Some will say that it's a memento mori, and that's undeniable, but I hope that it will also be heartening, especially to those who have given up all hope of recovery. I don't mean to offer false or cheap optimism, but I am saying that, if my example is to be trusted, the brain seems to be an astonishingly resilient organ, and one capable, in certain circumstances, of remarkable recovery.
The other audience for this book is, of course, myself. The consequences of my stroke were simply too colossal to be ignored or shut away in some mental pigeon-hole. Writing the book has been a way to make sense of an extraordinary personal upheaval, whose consequences will be with me until I die. Besides, I am a writer. Communicating experience is what I do, and quite soon after I realized that I was going to survive the initial crisis I also relaized that I had been given a story that made most of what I'd written previously pale and uninteresting by comparison.
Whatever you, the reader, take away from it, there's no escaping that it is a personal book, my version of an event that changed my life. The philosopher Wittgenstein writes, "How small a thought it takes to make a life." Throughout my period of recovery I was often alone with my thoughts. When, finally, I came to record these, this book became the mirror of an enforced season of solitude in the midst of a crowded life. I've called it My Year Off because, despite the overall grimness of the experience, there were, at every stage, moments of acute irony and, even, of the purest comedy to brighten the prevailing gloom and chase away the clouds of melancholy. P.G. Wodehouse, one of my favourite writers, once said that "There are two ways of writing ... [One is ....] a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn." There is, I'm afraid, not much musical comedy about having a stroke.
At times, my year off was one of all-pervading slowness, of weeks lived one day, even one hour, at a time, and of life circumscribed by exasperating new restrictions and limitations. The poet Coleridge observed that it is the convalescent who sees the world in its true colours, and, as a convalescent, I have been forced into a renewed acquaintanceship with my body and into the painful realization that I am, like it or not, imprisoned in it. I have learned, in short, that I am not immortal (the fantasy of youth) and yet, strangely, in the process I have been renewed in my understanding of family and, finally, of the one thing that really matters: love.
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