MY JEDI MEMOIR

A medical doctor, bestselling novelist, and Hollywood insider shares details from his eclectic life.

Kahn grew up in Illinois as the son of a general practitioner, and his interests have always been divided between medicine (which he describes as “a kind of sorcery”) and writing stories. After completing his medical internship, he took a year off to pen his first novel, Diagnosis: Murder (1980) about a crime-solving doctor. Later, while working as an emergency-room doctor at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, California, Kahn met with film producer Kathleen Kennedy, who needed an expert medical opinion on a movie she was working on with director Steven Spielberg: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). From there, Kahn’s life would be split between his career as a physician and his work on Hollywood productions. Spielberg would subsequently invite him to write the novelization of another blockbuster film he produced—Poltergeist (1982)—which set the stage for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when he was later asked to novelize the final film of the original Star Warstrilogy, Return of the Jedi (1983). Kahn’s highly approachable remembrance is full of engrossing stories about his work as an M.D., his stints as a screenwriter for multiple television shows, and his side gig as a folk musician who released six albums.However, his work on Jedi takes center stage; not only did he bear the pressure of producing a novelization for what was perhaps the most anticipated movie of all time, but he also had to do so without having seen the final film—including its most iconic scene, in which Luke Skywalker finds out the truth about Darth Vader. The memoir explicitly tailors its behind-the-scenes vignettes to Star Wars fans, pulling back the curtain on the production of Jedi and blending Luke’s heroic journey with Kahn’s own life as he came into his own as both a writer and a physician.

The engaging story of a doctor’s unlikely connection to some iconic films.