The extraordinary story of how Bauby composed his memoir is relayed modestly and minimally. His resilience was only just beginning to be tested, and yet he continued to push himself to the limit by deciding to begin composing a memoir. By the time he began composing The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, he had regained some control over his neck muscles and the ability to puff out-without any real sound quality-the letters of the alphabet.
Bauby drew strength for a while from his doctors’ refusal to answer definitively whether he’d ever regain any real control of his body-but as the months passed and Bauby struggled through intensive physical and speech therapy, he realized that he’d never have a normal life again. Upon waking, he found himself paralyzed-breathing, urinating, and eating through tubes, with his right eyelid stitched shut and his left the only part of his body he could move. When Bauby’s brain stem was severed from his spinal cord after a massive stroke, he fell into a coma for over a month. Bauby’s circumstances are extreme-and the measures he must take and the methods he must develop to overcome them are similarly intense. Though Bauby’s memoir is not technically an illness memoir or an in-depth look at medicine, the level of resilience, determination, and indeed courage Bauby shows after his stroke is incredible given the poor prognosis he’s given. Bauby also argues that the more impossible the task, the more impossible feats the person facing that task has the potential to accomplish.
A story of humor, grace, and resilience in the face of immense loss and isolation, Bauby’s account of his herculean fight to communicate, connect, examine his own past, and push against his new limits ultimately argues that the human spirit, in times of need, can persevere through extraordinary (and extraordinarily difficult) circumstances. Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has become an inspirational book for many in the twenty-plus years since its initial publication.
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