Sam Neill on his new memoir and living with blood cancer: ‘I’m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me’
If you came to Sam Neill’s memoir without knowing the first thing about it, chapter one would hold a terrible shock. It begins amusingly enough: a lovely anecdote about his daughter Elena being asked at school when she was little about what her dad does for work. “My daddy sits in caravans,” she says, an answer “both perceptive and entirely accurate” writes the actor, who then goes on to describe a life spent on film sets: sitting in trailers, reading the paper, having cups of tea, waiting for the magic moment when someone comes and says: “We need you on set, Mr Neill.”
The tone shifts to reflective. There’s a potted preamble on what it means to live a good life, thereby setting tone and topic for the book, there’s musing about why he’s even writing a book, about who will read it, then he’s sounding somewhat swan-songish. And then, there’s this:
“The thing is, I’m crook. Possibly dying. I may have to speed this up.”
As narrative set-ups go, it’s a hook all right. There are so many questions: is he OK? Will he
