Just Writing This Is Killing Me, Tales of Love and the Lockdown That Lasted Seventeen Years (forthcoming from Regal House Publishing, November 2027), encompasses nearly two decades of life with a terminal disease advancing with all deliberate speed, followed by the double lung transplant that sweeps away the grim diagnosis. It’s a story about living, not dying, about history, both public and private, and about love – affection, obsession, elation, infatuation, filial, familial, erotic, platonic. It moves from the Colorado Rockies to the Republic of Georgia, from Montreal to Manhattan, from New Hampshire to Namibia, from the United Nations to the National Institutes of Health.
Birds fall from the sky; innocents are slaughtered; an empire founders. Women are cuckolded—although one of them perhaps only in the racy and unreliable memory of her nonagenarian husband; a pulmonologist grieves his inability to heal his own father’s lung disease; in the Montreal suburbs, a doctor declares in French, “I’m no good with needles!” on the assumption that the patient, who is from New York, won’t understand.
Marbled with poetry, travelogue, and reflections on the necessity and the impossibility of translation, Just Writing This Is Killing Me unfolds at the intersection of high-stakes geopolitics and intimate personal confession.
Is it memoir, fiction, or essay?
Yes. All of it is true, and some of it really happened.
The same can be said of my debut, the unclassifiable For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors (University of Iowa Press, 2018), which holds the Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, and was a Kirkus Best Book of the Year.
Raised as an atheist, I worship at the altar of books, authors, languages and words. In a protracted but ultimately failed attempt to avoid becoming a writer, I worked as a newspaper reporter, dance and book reviewer, and also as an interpreter/translator of Russian and French to English, including for fifteen years at the United Nations. My translation of Stalin’s Secret Pogrom (Yale University Press, 1998), about the Night of the Murdered Poets, won the National Jewish Book Award for Eastern European history.
