One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir

In One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery. This "fake memoir," as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. Dostoyevsky shows up, as does Graham Greene. Keith Richards and Patti Hansen put in an appearance, Edith Piaf sings, Clint Eastwood saves the neighborhood, and the Rat Pack comes along for the ride. These and other avatars of popular culture help Lehman to make sense of his own mortality and life story. One Hundred Autobiographies reveals a stunning portrait of a mind against the ropes, facing its own extinction, surviving and enduring.

Table of Contents:
Preface 1. Execution Poem Expert 2. Spots of Time 3. Café Loup 4. No Big Deal 5. Cancer Alley 6. The Crisis 7. The Aftermath 8. The Procedure 9. The Protocol 10. The Good Kind 11. The Diarist 12. None But the Strong 13. Tropic of Cancer 14. Hospitals and Airports 15. Back to the Waiting Room 16. "Hurry up, please, it's time" 17. Why 1963? 18. Good Friday 19. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate! 20. The Weekend Before 21. "Bladder cancer: Isn't that what Sinatra died of?" 22. In a Technical Sense 23. Five O'Clock Rush 24. A Heart Event 25. Good Show 26. Metaport 27. If You Were an English Poet 28. The Regimen 29. A Few Beacons in the Quicksand 30. What's the Story? 31. Time Is on My Side 32. Rush Job 33. Final Call 34. And Then You Crash 35. Chemo 36. Roid Rage 37. Under the Garden 38. The End 39. Falling in Love Again 40. Nothingness 41. Syllabus 42. Commencement Speech 43. The Exquisite Corpse 44. The Editorial "We" 45. Oblivion 46. Dostoyevsky 47. The Spiritual Connection 48. "Myself, When Stoned" 49. Bloomsday 50. Tom Collins 51. The Admissions Officer 52. Columbia 53. Classic Koch 54. The Poem Team 55. Shakespeare's Birthday 56. Recovery Room 57. The Rebbe 58. Life Beings at Forty 59133. Search for Meaning 60. The Old Religion 61. The Problem of Evil 62. Dean Martin's Hat 63. 740 Francs 64. Shalom Aleichem Rides to the Rescue 65. The Arrival of the Messiah 66. Sabbath Services 67. A Complicated Guy 68. The Patient Next to You 69. Cambridge 70. Armistice Day, 1970 71. The Sublime Pain of Being 72. The Glass Skeleton 73. Why Does the Bridge Not Progress? 74. Q & A 75. Ludlowville, 1981 76. Bio Note (Alt.) 77. Wedding Ceremony 78. Moscow, 2007 79. Group Therapy 80. Fort Tryon Park 81. Fine Invention 82. Identity Theft 83. A Routine Visit 84. Doctor Jew 85. "Except for the cancer..." 86. The Heart Knows 87. A Black Dress 88. Heisenberg as Hero 89. Cheers! 90. Walter Lehmann 91. Rowing in Eden 92. I Remember Mama 93. No Regrets 94. If I Could 95. The Scar 96. The Secret 97. Like a Hurricane 98. In the Eyes of the Beholder 99. Champagne Cocktails 100. In the Swim

About the Author :
David Lehman is a poet and writer whose many books include New and Selected Poems, The Daily Mirror, and Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. For A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, he won ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award. Lehman is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and the series editor of The Best American Poetry. He divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and New York City.

Review :
Poet and critic Lehman...brilliantly captures the despair, uncertainty, and anger he felt in these 100 short reflections on life, death, and writing. Lehman's exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain. - Starred Review (Publisher's Weekly) Lehman's memoir pulses with life and memory. (The New York Jewish Week) While in throes of fighting cancer, David Lehman wrote every day he could, as a way of imaginatively affirming his existence and escaping the terrible ordeals of pain, dread, and emotional chaos. First of all figuring out a formal strategy, as expert poets do, Lehman then crafts a brilliant, inventive portrait of a mind, in language in which everything counts. The book's moral seriousness and theological and ancestral powers provide extreme aesthetic pleasure—Lehman's forms of language are forms of life, always life. One Hundred Autobiographies teaches and instructs its fortunate readers, like all great literature, which it is. (Literary Hub)