I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me: A Memoir

I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me: A Memoir

Call it a miracle, fate, pure luck, or just another day in the city where nothing is usual, but in 1991 Jimmy Breslin narrowly escaped death - which inspired him to write this book about his life. Two years ago, Breslin was having trouble getting his left eyelid to open and close. This was too peculiar to ignore, so Breslin decided to pay a rare visit to his doctor. As it turned out, the eyelid was a matter of nerves. But extensive testing revealed something unrelated and life-threatening: he had an aneurysm in his brain - a thin, ballooned artery wall that could burst and kill him at any moment unless he opted for a risky surgical procedure. Breslin agreed to the surgery and at age sixty-five, grateful for this miracle (what else could you call it?), began taking stock of his remarkable life. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jimmy Breslin reflects on his life after surviving a brain aneurysm in I Want To Thank My Brain For Remembering Me . From his childhood in Queens, to covering stories on Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and the Beatles, to his family and reverence for Catholicism, to the discovery, by "pure luck," that something was wrong, Breslin recalls the events and people of his past and the meaning they have for him in the present. This is his personal tribute to the magic of medicine and the fragility of all life. As Breslin concludes after the success of his operation, "things turned out pretty well." Readers of this marvelous memoir should thank Breslin's brain for saving his life. For if a case of severe eye pain had not driven Breslin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a notorious avoider of doctors, to his opthamologist, the aneurysm hidden in his brain would have remained undiscovered and eventually burst, killing him. Preparing for a risky surgery that could either cure him or leave him a vegetable, Breslin meditates in a series of candid and witty flashbacks on his extraordinary 65 years of life?his childhood in Queens ("My family were people with winter emotions who could not use warm, affectionate words"), the death of his first wife, his second marriage to New York City councilwoman Ronnie Eldridge, and the colorful eccentric characters he has encountered in his career as a reporter and columnist. Breslin has a true writer's passion for words and language; his graphic description of his surgery (definitely not for the squeamish) is as sharp and clean as a surgeon's knife ("My brain sits like a chalice on an altar of clean blue cloth"). Highly recommended for all collections.?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. Perhaps it is good that reporters and columnists don't write their own headlines: skip Table Money and Damon Runyon among Breslin's 10 previous books, and his titles average five words apiece--and Thank My Brain is the longest yet! But the long, puzzling title fits, since a dangerous operation to remove a brain aneurysm is both cause and core of Breslin's affecting memoir. Confronting the possibility of death just past age 65 or, much more terrifying, continued life without the capacity to string words into sentences and paragraphs others want to read, Breslin memory-surfs through a troubled childhood and a lifetime in various journalistic trenches, from copyboy to columnist, as he resists the diagnosis of a serious problem, goes through a battery of demanding tests, then leaves his beloved New York City to have his skull drilled open in (of all places) Phoenix. The book is full of family stories, political stories, and classic Breslin street stories, plus lots of details about brain operations from both patient's and surgeon's point of view. With or without his bulging brain vessel, the man knows how to write! Mary Carroll Prototypical ink-in-the-veins journalist Breslin (Damon Runyon, 1991; The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, 1969; etc.) now reports on a matter that concentrated his mind wonderfully, a matter for which his experience never prepared him: the opening of his skull to release an aneurysm. The burly columnist has fully recovered from a ``right pterinonal craniotomy with unruptured anterior communication artery aneurysm.'' A blood vessel in his brain was set to burst, quicker than a thought, at any time it chose. If not death, the event could have, for Breslin, triggered something worse. He could have lost all vocabulary and the ability to communicate. Happily, all is well inside the newsman's head. The evidence is this street-smart report from the purgatory of patienthood. On the armature of the life- threatening aneurysm, Breslin fleshes out a distinctive, funny memoir in the tones and syntax of the courtrooms and saloons of Brooklyn and Queens. It's a sage and cagey stream-of-consciousness flowing at extraordinary velocity. Here are family members as well as the likes of Lenny Bruce, Casey Stengel, and Marvin the Torch (``I build empty lots,'' said Marvin). In extremis, the remembrances of things pas