Laugh, cry with Michael J. Fox’s word tapestry
When Michael J. Fox told the world, in 1998, that he had been fighting Parkinson’s disease for the past seven years, it felt devastating to me in many ways. For one thing, like a lot of people of my generation, I had been a big fan of the hit ’80s TV sitcom “Family Ties.”
Fox’s disclosure was doubly shocking as not only was he just 29 when he was diagnosed, he was also not the kind of celebrity who seemed vulnerable at all. To imagine him compromised in any crisis seemed impossible.
“No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality” joins his other works in showing what attitude means to the illness equation.
This time Fox’s story is focused on something more unthinkable — the other things that can go wrong with a body that’s still carrying a devastating disease. This book centers on life going on for better or for worse, pivoting ultimately on a particularly impossible 2018, Fox’s “annus horriblis” as he calls it. Fox underwent major spinal surgery after a tumor had been found to on his spinal cord — unrelated to his Parkinson’s — and he had also taken a very bad fall — related to his Parkinson’s. The combination gave him and his family a whole new set of hurdles. Not to mention here we see him in his late 50s, dealing with career predicaments, we see him as a loyal husband and the father of four who are grappling with their unwavering devotion; here we see him in precarious mental health facing his first terrifying episode of psychosis.
Fox makes it through all this with both light humor and deep introspection: The entire book is well woven in a rich tragicomic tapestry.
Some of the most engaging parts are the ones where Fox’s past fame and his current fame intersect in awkward ways — the actor vs. the illness activist. “Don’t worry, he’s not taking your picture,” his wife tells him when a patient at the hospital takes out a cellphone near him.
But what makes the book a pageturner is its tenor: drolly conspiratorial, affably best-friend-y, infectiously convivial and unapologetically pensive. This a book you really hear whether you have the audiobook or not. The quality of the prose, the care in the pacing, the delight in storytelling, all made me reexamine why I read and write in this genre in the first place. In sharing so much of himself beyond buzz words and headlines, Fox has given us a gift we didn’t know to ask for, a gift that isn’t anywhere close to diminishing with his years.