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Coda by Simon Gray
bookshelves: winter-20142015, published-2008, epistolatory-diary-blog, medical-eew, autobiography-memoir, nonfiction, lifestyles-deathstyles, abandoned
Read from November 29 to December 03, 2014
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t170l
Description: From heartbreaking reflections on his own mortality to characteristically outrageous asides—"everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who was given six months to live, and here they are, only just dead, eight years later or, in exceptional cases, here they still are, eating oysters and boring the shit out of people"—Gray's self-proclaimed "last written words on the subject of myself" records his extraordinary emotional journey. Darkly comic depictions of the medical team are set against joyful accounts of sunlit days with this beloved wife, Victoria, in Crete and a beautiful early summer in Suffolk. Woven into the narrative are arguments with himself, "Dialogue between a Thicko and a Sicko," a shameful childhood memory, and a masterfully tense "distraction," written in real time while waiting for his final prognosis—and smoking one last cigarette. Written with exceptional candor and a poignant reluctance to leave this world behind, Coda is painful and beautiful.
The playwright and diarist's frank, moving and often painfully funny account of coming to terms with his terminal cancer. The doctor reveals the bad news about the playwright's cancer in his 'last written words on the subject of myself'. Facing terminal cancer, the playwright turns to newspaper obituaries and ends up wondering 'how many years did they manage?'.3* Otherwise Engaged
4* Quartermaine's Terms
AB Coda
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