A Worthy Weep: a Memoir-ic Reflection on Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air
On the whole, it’s probably wise that we as a culture have drifted away from the granite-like male sentiment that ‘real men don’t cry.’ Men can cry. That’s cool.
But that being said, as a man, I tend to shy away from a good, hearty cry. Call me old fashioned. As a six-foot-four male who weighs about the same as an adult black bear, I prefer a more stoic attitude toward life. It is no simple task to get these waterfalls gushing. But were you to walk into my Traber dorm room on one blustery January morning, you would find me strewn across a couch, a very recently read copy of When Breath Becomes Air sat ajar on my lap, looking as if I’d somehow mixed up my eyedrops with Jalapeño juice. I haven’t cried that much since Avengers: Endgame.
So what power brought this sobbing black bear to his knees? The memoir.
Like all genres of literature, the memoir has no single look. Loosely defined, the memoir falls under the branch of nonfiction and is typically a first-person narrative focusing on a pivotal, monumental, or memorable period of the author’s life. I feel the memoir most closely replicates the traditional fiction novel in that it develops characters, contains dialogue, and typically revolves around a single plot with the obvious difference from fiction being that it actually happened.
Memoirs provide room for the author’s authentic reflection on their own life, and they are especially poignant as real stories written by real people. Unlike the biography, however, the memoir is not holistic; it is merely a slice of a person’s life. Where the biographer, when wandering through the Art Institute of Chicago, would gaze upon the entirety of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, the memoir writer might inspect dubiously only the two depicted noses, as they may find great meaning shrouded within the pointy appendages. In short, memoirs are more thematically focused.
As a reader and a writer, I have found a great deal of love for the memoir due to its thematic reflection—the perfect mix between narrative and introspection. Of all the memoirs I have read, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air is the most compelling, and how he chooses to approach his theme of death (what a lighthearted choice!) is, I believe, something everyone must read before they inevitably find themselves face-to-face with the hooded emissary.
In the 2010s, Paul Kalanithi was the Achilles of the neurosurgery world (his curriculum vitae is horrendously impressive) and, as a surgeon, he desired to focus on his “imminent role, intimately involved with the when and how of death” (Kalanithi 66). As a neurosurgeon, life and death were quite literally in his hands (he records how a two-millimeter scalpel mistake—roughly the thickness of a credit card—could be fatal) and he spends a meaningful section of the book reflecting on his own journey through that role. Then, at the age of thirty-six, Kalanithi is diagnosed with advanced stage lung cancer. The man who once held death in his hands now found it spreading throughout his body.
And that right there is a pretty compelling place to start a book—I’d be hooked. But Paul Kalanithi does something special using the form of the memoir to turn When Breath Becomes Air from gripping into great. Using thematic reflection on his own experiences in the medical field face-to-face with death, the dead man walking teaches his readers how to live.
Here’s an example: “In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete” (Kalanithi 172). Kalanithi takes his focus theme, central to the memoir, reflects upon how it has affected his own life as both the doctor and now the patient, and then expands his introspection onto the life of the reader (absolutely brilliant!).
Paul Kalanithi is a masterclass writer but his leap from experience to reflection (what I’d argue is central to a good memoir) is easily replicable. It’s similar to what we might do during any small reflective moment—when journaling, enjoying the hot water of a morning shower, or zoning out at chapel (but not me—that’d be disrespectful). Kalanithi abstracts his own memories then asks the question: what does this say about the human experience? That very question is how an author can get to the heart of meaning, and, while this is commonly done in the memoir, it is available to the writer of all forms of literature.
So put down your computer, turn off the Reels, forget about the mounds of homework for a minute, and go read Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air.
I beg you.
Not only is Kalanithi’s memoir a once-in-a-generation book—a learned man with a mind for both medicine and literature who confronts death face-to-face in first his patients and then himself—but his memoir is an example of great reflection, which I believe is key to leading a worthwhile (and God-fearing) life.
I can attest, it’s a worthy read—and a worthy weep.