Diana Wichtel
Diana Wichtel on her most entertaining interviewee
It’s a question a journalist gets asked: who have you most enjoyed interviewing? “Enjoy” isn’t always the word but there was Anne Perry, born Juliet Hulme. She was 15 in 1954 when, with Pauline Parker, she murdered Parker’s mother with a brick in a stocking in a Christchurch park. “Is there anybody who hasn’t made mistakes thinking it was the right thing to do at the time? No. Exactly,” she told me briskly. She writes murder mysteries.
Russell Brand, Paul Holmes, Zadie Smith, Barry Humphries, Don Brash, Kim Hill, John Clarke … I like the ones who mess with your head. In truth, after an hour spent in the strange intimacy of interrogation, I like them all.
Top spot: Oliver Sacks — neurologist, writer, excavator of the extremes of human fragility. Robin Williams played him in the movie of his book, Awakenings. His collection of case histories, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat — brilliant, funny — is science that demands to also be art. Stardom didn’t impress some of his peers. “The man who mistook his patients for a literary career,” sneered one.
In his youth he did weightlifting, rode a motorbike, took drugs, nearly self-destructed. I’ve been thinking about him because we broke the new stay-home habits of a pandemic and went to the movies. Oliver Sacks: His Own Life covers his work, his life and its impending extinction. There was a bad cancer prognosis in 2015. He wrote about it in the New York Times and proceeded to live, as did many of his patients, as vibrantly as circumstances allowed.
He was famously unusual. In 2007 I asked if he thought he was neurotypical. “I think there may be a hint of something atypical here and there. I wouldn’t care to be more precise.” The film reveals that he did the same dance with his psychiatrist. He asked whether he was schizophrenic, like his brother. “No,” said the doctor. Was he merely neurotic? “No.” The subject wasn’t raised again.
When he came out to his parents, his mother said, “You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born.” End of discussion. His mother was a doctor. In his first memoir he wrote that, when he was 10, she would bring home deformed fetuses in jars for him to dissect. When he was 12 she took him along to dissect the corpse of a 14-year-old girl. When we spoke he was reticent about that story. One of his brothers, he said, stricken, disapproved of him telling it. It doesn’t make it into the new film. “I did not know if I would ever be able to love the warm, quick bodies of the living after facing, smelling, cutting the formalin-reeking corpse of a girl my own age,” he had written. “Yeah, well I was being melodramatic,” he told me. “There have been quite a number of warm, quick bodies since.”
In the film, Sacks happily recounts startlingly intimate anecdotes, one involving a bowl of jelly. Yet he introduces his partner Bill Hayes — he found love late — as a writer who lives in the building. He was a man of painful sensitivity and deep empathy, doing battle with the remains of a debilitating British reserve.
We compared notes on migraines, the visual pyrotechnics. “Oh, that’s much the best part!” His first, aged 2, gave him an early sense that the world is constructed — and can be dismantled — by your own nervous system; a beautiful, terrifying thought. He played me a tape of Woody, a patient lost to Alzheimer’s, singing. “He sings with such sensitivity and humour!” The lights may be out, he wanted to show me, but somewhere, someone is home.
“I would just listen,” he said, of his modus operandi, “and get the experience of someone very different from myself.” The ability to imagine another way of being shimmers beneath everything he did. In our shouty, polarised world, that’s a rare gift.
‘I think there may be a hint of something atypical here and there. I wouldn’t care to be more precise.’
— Oliver Sacks
NEXT WEEK: Steve Braunias