Preface
In my seventies, I had a run of luck, brushing up against the famous, falling in love, having my eighth and strangest novel published, dodging a couple of serious illnesses. Then my luck ran out, and I was diagnosed with cancer. Passing Down is a collection of twenty writings tracing my shift from luck to lack, to loss and eventually, perhaps, to recovery. It’s a conventional narrative but is destabilized by the inclusion of three short stories that suggest Passing Down could be a fact-heavy autofiction. The unreliable protagonist/narrator of those stories says, “No game, no gain.” The protagonist’s creator agrees and plays with the conventions of memoir by presenting a possibly unreliable author named Tom LeClair.
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking shadows Passing Down, but it’s more subtle than her response to trauma. The book is instead about a pridefully reasonable person, literary like Didion, whose lucidity is undermined by a relatively unthreatening disease—prostate cancer--and by its treatment. Dramatizing how and investigating why this unexpected loss of clarity happens are my purposes here because I assume many more people have similar diagnoses than have terminal prognoses or Didion’s horrible luck. When writing the essays, I didn’t intend to publish them, but perhaps they will help some of those presumed many avoid my losses and lurches into or toward fiction.
The first six writings in Passing Down—four essays, a story, one poem—record a few years of septuagenarian luck ending in 2023. The fourteen post-diagnosis pieces were written in the first seven months of 2024. I wanted to think about my situation by writing about it, and I assumed essays would require more rigor than journal entries. Looking back now on the essays, I find some of them strange, but I have not revised the pieces. Whatever the eccentricities of these quickly written essays, they record facts and register my responses in real time, real cancer time. Near the end of Passing Down, the fictional character enters and questions the author’s reliability in the essays, his reliance on fictions. The game is left for the reader to resolve and perhaps replay.
On my father’s deathbed, when he was no longer able to speak, he made an energetic sign of the cross like the Pope on his balcony when anyone walked into my father’s room in the nursing home. I wish I had a blessing to bestow in these writings, but, as the “old man” narrator of Eliot’s “Gerontion” says, “I would meet you upon this honestly.” What I offer here are accounts of a now 81-year-old man trying to preserve his long faith in literature and his even longer faith in embodiment, in being—like the basketball-playing protagonist of his stories--an athlete to the end, to the last.
Memoirists need to be famous or traumatized to be published. I’m neither, so am offering Passing Down on Substack. With some attention, it might eventually become lucky book number thirteen.