The last time I spoke to Michael J Fox, in 2013, in his office in New York, he was 90% optimistic and 10% pragmatic. The former I expected; the latter was a shock. Ever since 1998, when Fox went public with his diagnosis of early-onset Parkinson’s disease, he has made optimism his defining public characteristic, because of, rather than despite, his illness. He called his 2002 memoir Lucky Man, and he told interviewers that Parkinson’s is a gift, “albeit one that keeps on taking”.
During our interview, surrounded by the memorabilia (guitars, Golden Globes) he has accrued over the course of his career, he talked about how it had all been for the best. Parkinson’s, he said, had made him quit drinking, which in turn had probably saved his marriage. Being diagnosed at the heartbreakingly young age of 29 had also knocked the ego out of his career ambitions, so he could do smaller things he was proud of – Stuart Little, the TV sitcom Spin City – as opposed to the big 90s comedies, such as Doc Hollywood, that were too often a waste of his talents. To be honest, I didn’t entirely buy his tidy silver linings, but who was I to cast doubt on whatever perspective Fox had developed to make a monstrously unjust situation more bearable? So the sudden dose of pragmatism astonished me. Finding a cure for Parkinson’s, he said, “is not something that I view will happen in my lifetime”. Previously, he had talked about finding “a cure within a decade”. No more. “That’s just the way it goes,” he said quietly. It was like a dark cloud had partly obscured the sun.
In a year of chaos and confusion, it's often been Noah's own show that we've all found ourselves watching. While we were struggling to Zoom into meetings back in March, Noah made a seamless transition to shooting The Daily Show in his apartment. As the nation convulsed over the latest viral videos of police killing Black people, Noah looked squarely into his cell phone camera and found what felt like the right words to say about George Floyd. If 2020 was a year that most Americans would like to forget, Noah's work is one thing we'll remember about it.
“For me, this has been one of the most liberating years mentally and emotionally, because it freed me from a lot of the paradigms and anchors that I had created for myself,” Noah told me. “For me, the coronavirus, if you look at it objectively, has stripped away a lot of the bullshit.”
The book, which follows the critically lauded “Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self,” from 2010, examines alienation and the phantasmagoria of racial performance—how certain interactions can seem so forced and strange that they might as well take place underwater.
Like the best autobiographers, Barack Obama writes about himself in the hope of discovering who or even what he is. It’s a paradoxical project for a man who is universally known and idolised, but this uncertainty or insecurity is his motivating force and his most endearing quality.