Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. My guest is the critically acclaimed, best-selling author Julian Barnes. He was diagnosed six years ago with a rare form of blood cancer, but it's not a death sentence. It's treatable, which means he'll be on a chemo drug for the rest of his life. His 80th birthday is Monday. Tuesday is the publication date of his new book, which he says will be his last.
Chapter 2: What motivated Julian Barnes to write his last book 'Departures'?
It's called Departures. It's part memoir, part fiction. The memoir sections are about his diagnosis and his reflections on death, why he's agnostic, the power and unreliability of memory, and how his memory has been diminishing with age.
In a way, his new book is a companion to his book Levels of Life, which was in part about grief and the death of his wife, Pat Cavanaugh, who was also his literary agent. She died in 2008, just 37 days after being diagnosed with a rare, hyper-aggressive brain tumor. They'd been married about 30 years. The New York Times Review described the book as shattering.
Barnes won Britain's highest literary award, the Man Booker Prize, in 2011 for his novel The Sense of an Ending. His breakthrough novel, Flaubert's Parrot, was shortlisted for the prize. Before Barnes was known for his books, he was a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement and a book and TV critic for British Publications. Julian Barnes, welcome back to Fresh Air.
I really like your new book a lot. I found it very meaningful. Good, good.
That's a good start.
It seems like a momentous couple of days next week, turning 80 and having not only your new book, but the book you call your final book published. So how are you feeling about all that right now?
I'm feeling quite excited. It's been a very strange five months up to now because in August I got married. In December, I had a serious back operation. First time I've really been seriously put out and given morphine and stuff like that, which is very interesting. And then I get my 80th birthday, and then I get my book publication.
I can't remember a period of months when there's been so much going on. So I'm still well alive and enjoying myself.
I would rather have a book published than back surgery.
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Chapter 3: How has Julian Barnes dealt with grief after losing his wife?
It's a form of blood cancer which is quite rare. I don't boast about that. It just means it's hard to diagnose.
It makes you unique.
Well, there are about 500 cases a year in Britain of this sort of cancer. So, yeah, I feel... Well, you can't feel proud of an illness, but I feel it's slightly different. And they pick it up when you have a blood test for something else. And so I had a routine blood test, and then my doctor called me up
about two mornings later and says, we haven't had your full results, but I want you to go straight to accident and emergency and tell them you've got a very high potassium reading. So I went off and took various provisions from chocolate to cryptic crossword and so on. And it took a while for them to find out exactly what it was. They thought it was something of the nature of leukemia.
But it turned out to be, fortunately not leukemia, but a sort of... Well, it's not curable and there's no research into this form of cancer. So I'm stuck with taking chemo every day for the rest of my life.
Pills, right?
Pills, yes, yes. One gram a day and then an extra half gram at weekends just to up the fun. And there's a 5% chance it might mutate into something like leukemia, but it's essentially stable. And they say it probably won't reduce my life expectancy, but who knows.
So let's get to your new book. The main character is named Julian Barnes, and he's narrating the book and talks about his own grief through the book. You lost your wife, your first wife, in 2008. Yes. And she was also your literary agent.
She was indeed.
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Chapter 4: What does Julian Barnes reveal about his diagnosis with blood cancer?
I was sort of strangely detached. I thought, oh, so that's how they tell you. And also I felt interested in all the medical side of it. I love talking to doctors and consultants and nurses. They stick their needles into your arm and take off pints of blood. It's very interesting.
But, of course, it does get, like many things, it does get a bit tedious on the 34th time of taking a pint of blood out of you.
And yet, you've kind of lived in fear of death your whole life. You thought about death a lot. You've been afraid of death. And although your blood cancer isn't a death sentence, it's not going to help you live longer either.
No, it's definitely not going to do that.
You know, it will make your body more vulnerable. So it's interesting that you felt detached when you got the diagnosis and not fearful.
No, I didn't feel fearful and I didn't feel angry either. I'm not quite sure why. I think I found it interesting, you see, with human beings but also perhaps a novelist's interest. You know, what's the shape and form of this? Who's going to do anything about it? What are they going to do with anything? Am I a goner or not? And so on.
I mean, I've got to know hospitals in the last few years quite well, and I don't feel fear going into them. I think, oh, I wonder how noisy this MRI scan is going to be, and so on. I suppose it's one way of putting off the fear, but it's also genuine interest, yes.
The third sentence of your new book, Departures, says that your interest tends toward the ghoulish and the extreme. So give us a couple of the examples, and why do you think that you're interested in the ghoulish and the extreme of the body?
Oh, just because I'm a sort of sick Brit, I suppose.
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Chapter 5: How does Julian Barnes blend memoir and fiction in 'Departures'?
Why do the unjust succeed? Why do innocent people get suddenly killed? It makes no sense except that the defense from the religious is God moves in mysterious ways we simply don't know. We'll find out later. That's sort of not good enough for me.
After your wife died, you said that if the grief didn't stop, you would consider taking your life, ending your life. Did you give yourself like a border, like if you reached that border, that you would try to end your life?
I remember very clearly when I thought that I might kill myself. It was a few weeks after my wife had died and I was walking home and I looked across at the curb on the other side of the road. And at that moment, I still see that curb stone on a daily basis. And I thought, of course, you can kill yourself. That's permissible. It's not unforgivable in my morality. I'm extremely unhappy.
I'm bereft. I'm lost, though I have many friends. I think I said, or a friend said to me, I can't remember which way around it was, give it two years. I said, okay, I'll give it two years. But before that two-year period had elapsed, I discovered the reason why I couldn't kill myself. I wasn't allowed to kill myself. And that's because I was the best rememberer of my wife.
I knew her and I had celebrated her in all her forms and in all her nature. And I had loved her deeply. And I realized that if I killed myself, then I would in a way be killing her too. I'd be killing the best memories of her. They would disappear from the world. And I just wasn't wouldn't allow myself to do that. And at that point, it just turned on its head.
And I, I knew I'd have to live with grief for quite a long time. But I didn't think an answer to the grief was killing myself.
So you're a new wife and you're pretty recently married. How does she feel about you having written so much about your first wife? I'm wondering, like, does she feel in the shadow of that? Does she feel uncomfortable with you talking about how long your grief lasted and all, you know?
Well, I can't really speak for her, but she once said to me, when we'd been together for, I don't know, two or three years, she said, I love the way you love Pat. And Pat had been dead for 13 years or something. So she is remarkably open and realistic. It doesn't mean I love her any less. It's just that I think it's right to remember and to write about the dead.
My guest is Julian Barnes. His new book is called Departures. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. You've written a lot about memory, including in your new book, and so has one of your favorite authors, Proust.
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