The Oliver Sacks I Knew and Loved Once Saw Himself as a Failure

Credit…Vanessa Saba The Oliver Sacks that most of the world knew — the one I fell in love with after we met in 2008, when he was 75 — was the beloved neurologist and the author of many best-selling books, admired worldwide. A forthcoming volume of Oliver’s letters, nearly 350 of them, spanning 55 years, from age 27 to 82, provides a more complicated picture of the man often referred to in his later years as “the poet laureate of medicine.” Even I, his partner for the last six years of his life, was surprised by what I read in many of these letters, which will be published next month for the first time. (A selection of excerpts from the letters will appear below this essay.) Episodes or stories I’d certainly heard about or read about in his autobiography “On the Move ” come startlingly, vividly to life in the letters, illuminated as they are by the irrepressible now of Oliver’s voice . We are in his mind, in his thoughts, in the heat of the moment, as he bangs out letter after letter on a typewriter or with a fountain pen (Oliver never owned a computer or sent an email or text). In 1965, a 31-year-old Oliver wrote a letter to his parents about his application for a position at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. The required letters of recommendation, he wrote, had been solicited and sent. Oliver, in an attempt at self-deprecating humor, included a mock quotation about him from an unnamed boss: “He arrives late, he rides a motorcycle, he dresses like a slob, but he has a good mind tucked away somewhere, and maybe you’ll have better luck with him than we have had. I like him, but he has given me a lot of gray hairs.” He did land the job, and spent a number of years at Einstein and working at Beth Abraham Hospital, where he encountered the patients he would later write about in “Awakenings.” But he never quite found his way, made friends or fit in. In a […]

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