Today, my library shelves are filled with books by doctors, spanning the whole arc of a medical career—from “A Not Entirely Benign Procedure,” a memoir of medical-student life by the N.Y.U. pediatrician Perri Klass, to the self-lacerating retrospect of the British surgeon Henry Marsh’s “Do No Harm,” which broods on mistakes made during a long and outwardly illustrious career. Somewhere between these, I can now slot in Jay Wellons’s vivid mid-career memoir, “All That Moves Us” (Random House). Wellons is the chief of pediatric neurosurgery at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in Nashville, and has begun to write, as I did, after some twenty years in medicine.
His book unfolds in a harrowing series of operating-room vignettes, explaining the work of his hands while also evoking the tension in his mind and his heart. Before his medical training, Wellons was an English major at the University of Mississippi, where he took writing classes with the novelist Barry Hannah and the poet Ellen Douglas. It shows, both in his narrative control and in the freshness of his descriptive touches.
The right to be helped to die is the central issue in this novel, but the narrative theme is the effect on Erin, focusing on her sense of dislocation.
They’re a family of competitive swimmers – most powerful in the water. It’s the one thing the three women have in common; the thing both Erin and her mum admire Aunty Wynn for, but the last time Erin swam in a race she bombed out, badly. And she hasn’t had a lot of success in anything else since.
This is a story of that love, betrayals, and forgiveness, told with a backdrop history and of war, and what war can do to a person's emotional balance.
The onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic in the early months of 2020 – and the subsequent lockdowns which followed – provoked different responses in people. Some saw the periods spent confined inside as a depressive ode to lost time; others eagerly experimented in hobbies or binge-watched Netflix.
Carmel Bird – like many writers – spent lockdown reading. In the ‘strange beauty of the stillness of the solitude suddenly brought about by the pandemic’, Bird embarked on a journey to reread the texts which shaped her as a person, a reader, and a writer. Telltale is the result. Part-reading diary, part-intertextual memoir, Bird takes us on a narrative voyage of her bibliophilic life.