CURVEBALL

The Book in 300 Words, Through A Very Different Lens

During the last Great Ice Age, a seemingly insignificant mutation in the genetic code of a Neanderthal infant initiated a chain of events that left me fighting for life forty thousand years later. I am a direct lineal descendant of that Neanderthal child — one of the millions who grew from her line and whose lives have been shaped, and often cut tragically short, by the devastation of Hereditary Hemochromatosis. That single hitch in her protohuman genome passed on through over one thousand interceding generations left me so devastatingly ill that a team of Manhattan doctors declared me to be “incompatible with life,” a term I’ve proudly reclaimed as the title of my recent book.

The remarkable story of that Neanderthal infant — along with dozens of other equally fascinating forays into science, literature, history, philosophy, music, art, psychology, and the nuances of human love — is explored in this engrossing book, which might prove to be a great success in the market, if only I can find an impassioned agent to shepherd it to publication — and I’d like that to be you.

Care to dance?

While Incompatible With Life fits perfectly on a bookshelf between Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s heartrending, bestselling self-elegy When Breath Becomes Air and Susannah Cahalan’s fire-breathing, million-selling memoir of madness and return, Brain on Fire, my book is something more, still. The story takes readers along an epic struggle to survive the ravages of grave illness while patiently and passionately exploring the psychological, intellectual, spiritual, and narrative worlds of man who is consciously dying. That path — one we will all someday travel — led through darkness and despair into a world of hallucinations, visions, and sublime truths as a single human consciousness wrestled with existence’s end. It is an at-time-harrowing and at-times-glorious journey to a place of profound peace, deep interconnectedness, healing love, and a resurgence back to a life transformed.

Call me.