Synopses & Reviews
Joshua Cody, a brilliant young composer, was about to receive his PhD when he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of 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 beautiful Ariel, who gives him cocaine and a blow job in a Manhattan restaurant following his first treatment; 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 Don Giovanni and the Rolling Stones, Ezra Pound and Buffalo Bill, and studded with pages from his own diaries and hospital notebooks, is a mesmerizing, hallucinatory glimpse into a young man's battle against disease and a celebration of art, language, music, and life.
Review
"Watching Cody chart the newly realized connectivity of his passions, memories, illusions, and delusions against a ticking clock is exhilarating, and will send you reeling, too." Elle
Review
"Hilarious and cracklingly intelligent, fully alive and original in every sentence, and abuzz with the feel of our late-latemodern moment." Jonathan Franzen
Review
"To open this book is to engage with a spirit at once endlessly curious, genuinely funny, fiercely intelligent, and wonderfully perverse. Reading it I kept having the uncanny sense that I was holding something alive in my hands, something with a pulse. This book is a true gift, a wild ride, and a tour-de-force performance. Welcome to the new face of memoir." Guardian
Review
"In [sic], the young classical composer Joshua Cody outstrips the weepy conventions of a cancer memoir by mixing aggressive, intelligent prose with shocking confessions, like the time he had cocaine-fueled sex with a stranger after chemotherapy." Nick Flynn
Review
"[Cody's] description of the havoc wrought by both the disease and its treatment is devastating." Stephen Heyman T Magazine
Review
"A raw, seductive memoir about [Cody's] descent into illness and excess . . . offers a beguiling, disquieting performance of the madness and humanity that can attend such life-disfiguring periods." New York Times Book Review
Review
"[A] sprightly, manic cancer memoir... The resulting G-force of sex and death and insanity - and also, improbably, of music and math and modernist poetry - is the only evidence you need that for all its seeming formlessness, is in fact as artfully constructed as a Tarantino film." Guardian
Synopsis
Moving effortlessly between references to Don Giovanni and the Rolling Stones, Ezra Pound and Buffalo Bill, and studded with pages from his own diaries and hospital notebooks, sic] is a mesmerizing, hallucinatory glimpse into a young man s battle against disease and a celebration of art, language, music, and life. "
Synopsis
"The memoir of the year . . . a book in which the sentences swing into you like small, gleaming axes."--
Synopsis
“The memoir of the year . . . a book in which the sentences swing into you like small, gleaming axes.”—New York Times
About the Author
Joshua Cody received his bachelor's degree in music composition from Northwestern University and his master's and doctoral degrees from Columbia University. He is a composer and filmmaker living in New York City.