A LIFE DERAILED

In this memoir, a man chronicles the emotional and physical burdens of living with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

In 2010, Methot began to experience the inexplicable signs of physical decline—an athletic man, he struggled to ski or play basketball with the robust agility he once enjoyed. He noticed that he seemed to lose the ability to play the saxophone and could no longer handle the consumption of alcohol with the same aplomb. He avoided confronting the issue—he became a “champion of self-serving delusion”—but finally the symptoms were too strong to ignore, and he sought the help of a doctor, who diagnosed him with ALS. At the time, the author was only 27 years old. Methot’s life was forever transformed—he became increasingly incapable of taking care of himself, eventually had to move back in with his parents, and finally needed the assistance of a wheelchair. With impressive precision and frankness, the author documents his experiences, including the terrible toll it took on him psychologically: “I mourn the loss of the person I used to be. I can’t be the only one. When my friends look at me, who do they see? Sometimes I feel like I’m already gone.” This is a bracingly candid memoir, one that makes a concerted effort to avoid the comforting platitudes of many self-help books. While this unwavering commitment to the hard truth of his circumstances is as admirable as it is refreshing, it can finally become gruelingly morose: “A positive attitude is not going to help; I’m not going to beat this.” Nevertheless, this remembrance, for all its understandable dourness, does not simply succumb to despair—Methot acknowledges the ways in which he is genuinely fortunate. This is a profoundly sad but also unflinching account of a life-altering sickness—readers will be impressed by the author’s intractable resistance to the allure of false hope, a refusal conveyed in subtly intelligent terms.

A thoughtful and uncompromising account of the ravages of a terminal illness.