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    A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing
    A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing
    A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing
    Ebook231 pages3 hours

    A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing

    By Reynolds Price

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Reynolds Price has long been one of America's most acclaimed and accomplished men of letters -- the author of novels, stories, poems, essays, plays, and a memoir. In A Whole New Life, however, he steps from behind that roster of achievements to present us with a more personal story, a narrative as intimate and compelling as any work of the imagination.

    In 1984, a large cancer was discovered in his spinal cord ("The tumor was pencil-thick and gray-colored, ten inches long from my neck-hair downward"). Here, for the first time, Price recounts without self-pity what became a long struggle to withstand and recover from this appalling, if all too common, affliction (one American in three will experience some from of cancer). He charts the first puzzling symptoms; the urgent surgery that fails to remove the growth and the radiation that temporarily arrests it (but hurries his loss of control of his lower body); the occasionally comic trials of rehab; the steady rise of severe pain and reliance on drugs; two further radical surgeries; the sustaining force of a certain religious vision; an eventual discovery of help from biofeedback and hypnosis; and the miraculous return of his powers as a writer in a new, active life.

    Beyond the particulars of pain and mortal illness, larger concerns surface here -- a determination to get on with the human interaction that is so much a part of this writer's much-loved work, the gratitude he feels toward kin and friends and some (though by no means all) doctors, the return to his prolific work, and the "now appalling, now astonishing grace of God."

    A Whole New Life offers more than the portrait of one brave person in tribulation; it offers honest insight, realistic encouragement and inspiration to others who suffer the bafflement of catastrophic illness or who know someone who does or will.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateApr 10, 2000
    ISBN9781439107751
    A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing
    Author

    Reynolds Price

    Reynolds Price (1933–2011) was born in Macon, North Carolina. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he taught at Duke beginning in 1958 and was the James B. Duke Professor of English at the time of his death. His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.

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    • 3/5
      I remember being moved by this story of the author's battle with severe illness and recovery. Price leads his readers through all of the physical and emotional upheaval that his illness caused as it advanced. In slightly more than a year, longer than his doctors had anticipated, he was irreversibly a paraplegic. Future surgeries left Price in such unimaginable pain that he resorted to biofeedback and hypnosis to help control it. His attempt to regain some of his former life are courageous.However, the most important memory I have of the book is that in the reading it I began to question the difference between truth and fiction. I wondered how true the memories of the author were really in baring the changes in his life.
    • 4/5
      Reynolds Price died just ten days ago, a sad occasion that prompted me to finally pick up and read his 1994 memoir, A WHOLE NEW LIFE. I'd been a Price reader since my college days when, in 1969, I read his first novel, A Long and Happy Life. Since then I'd read The Surface of Earth and a couple of his other exquisitely introspective southern novels. So reading this memoir about his pain-filled and courageous struggle with spinal cancer in the mid-80s was something of an eye-opener for me. I hadn't known about his cancer. The style, given its grim subject, is much more direct and starkly stated than other Price books I'd read. Even so, he does manage to wax philosophic here and there about his years-long ordeal with excruciating pain following multiple surgeries and massive doses of radiation therapy, all attempts to rid him of a long tumor wrapped within his spinal cord - an evil invasive presence he learned to call "the eel." He was left a paraplegic with useless legs and little feeling in his body from the chest down and endured years of pharmaceutical cocktails, largely useless attempts to quell his chronic pain. Finally through the methods of hypnosis and biofeedback he learned to live with the pain, which never really left him. The descriptions of the diagnosis, surgeries and subsequent treatment are necessarily grim, but Price also makes clear his gratitude to many of his doctors, nurses and other caregivers and close friends. One aspect of his sickness and struggles to recover which I found especially interesting and poignant was the way in which the community of writers rallied around Price with letters, calls and visits. Many of them were not even especially close friends, but people who had met him at various events and respected his body of work. "... far from demonstrating the rivalry and backbiting of which we're often accused - fellow writers helped me especially with phone calls and letters. A stranger to Philip Roth, for instance, approached him in Central Park that July of '84, said 'Reynolds Price has spinal cancer'; and Philip was on the phone to me at once." Other writers who wrote or called included John Updike, Frederick Busch, Stephen Spender, William Styron, Anne Tyler, Thomas McGuane, Toni Morrison, and Eudora Welty. He even heard from opera singer, Leontyne Price. Indeed, were Price still with us, I too would write him 'posthaste,' as did Updike. There are poems interspersed throughout the book, as well as a short selection of poetry at the end of the narrative - all pieces Price wrote during his illness. In sum, A Whole New Life is perhaps one of the most eloquent and understated records of a grave and painful illness you will ever find. My admirations for Price has increased a hundredfold since reading it; now I want to read his other memoir, CLEAR PICTURES, and perhaps will also seek out his novel, THE TONGUES OF ANGELS. Price taught for over 50 YEARS at Duke. He was 77 when he died on January 20, 2011.
    • 5/5
      This is an achingly painful memoir of North Carolina writer Reynolds Price's life and death/health and wholeness issues between 1984 and 1994. From a dragging foot to finding a 10 inch long malignant tumor intertwined in his spinal cord, through radiation, excrutiating pain, paralysis, paraplegia and upwards to hope, renewed faith, and increasing professional output and creative success, Price minces no words, leaves no emotions or reactions uncovered, and reaches and shares some remarkable conclusions. The title, A Whole New Life is wonderfully apt and the subtitle, An Illness and a Healing, traces a remarkable recovery of a surprising sort.

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    A Whole New Life - Reynolds Price

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