Oliver Sacks's not quite nonfiction

us to talk about her storybook career, and the March Madness Bracket is out, and we have

“thoughts and predictions to share. Plus, we're also taking a look at the end of yourselves”

blockbuster opening weekend. Check out the latest episode of a Touchmore wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Mormons are having a moment, but some in the church wonder if that's actually a good thing. I'm not so concerned about Mormonism kind of being radicalized. I'm actually more concerned about it becoming so obsessed with assimilation, that it kind of loses sight of what it actually is.

What happens when faith goes mainstream? That's this week on explaining to me. Find new episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. I recently sat down with one of my favorite writers. I'm Rachel Aviv, and I'm a staff writer at the New Yorker. But I called her up to talk about a different writer.

“I remember the first story I pitched for the New Yorker. I tried to make it clear, like,”

"Don't worry, I'm not trying to do an Oliver's axe piece because I didn't want to think that I was daring to compete." I really admired his ability to just delve deeply into the inner life of one person. The late neurologist and bestselling author Oliver Sachs. He's been referred to as the poet laureate of medicine. It was like almost the figurehead for medical humanities in a way, like this idea that we have been focusing too much on symptoms and data, and that there is a human

life behind all of this information. Oliver Sachs did something kind of wild for his time. He was a medical doctor who wrote intricate stories about the inner lives of his own patients.

“I do remember being my early 20s reading a piece he'd written about a man who was blind and was”

sort of grappling with the possibility of regaining his sight. I loved how he was focused on one person, sort of one person's journey. He was so focused on the inner life of this person and that it was so textured. Kind of was like, "How did he know those details? How did he know the fat man was thinking that?" Maybe the best example of one of these stories is from the book Awakenings, which he published in the early 1970s. He writes about spending 15-hour days at a hospital

with a group of patients suffering from a disease called encephalitis lethargica, a sickness that

left them catatonic, basically asleep while awake. Patients that no other doctors were really

paying attention to and kind of developing a wordless rapport with people that were really easy to dismiss as sort of not fully cognizant. And he spent so much time with them that he was able to sort of detect that they were not like Komato's and the way that other people thought they were. That book was adapted for the screen and became an Academy Award-nominated film. It's starred Robert De Niro as a patient named Leonard and Robin Williams who played a fictional

all of her sacks. Towards the end of the movie, he gives a speech about the awakening of the human

spirit. But the human spirit is more powerful than any drug. And that is what needs to be nourished.

It's work, play, friendship, family, these are things that matter. This is what we've forgotten. It's simplest things. Basically, he meant human connection could somehow awaken the spirit beyond medical care alone. Late last year, Rachel wrote a huge magazine story about all of her sacks for the New Yorker. I became aware that all her sacks had this enormous archive.

An archive of diaries and letters that sacks had kept over decades. He documented not just the lives of other patients, but his own experience as a patient, in therapy. Rachel got in touch with his foundation and got permission to take a look. I was like, how is this possible that this

amazing man was in therapy for 50 years? What does a half century psychoanalytic process look like?

in the therapeutic process and how much can someone change in 50 years of therapy? How far

“to self-knowledge go? Today, we're going to follow Rachel Aviv's journey through the life of one of”

the most famous science writers of our time. A profile of a man known for his truth telling in medicine, who Rachel discovered bent the truth. In his journals, he would just sort of reflect on what he had done and try to make sense of it and he would sort of think through like, art is the lie that tells the truth am I doing art or am I crossed a line? I'm Amy Padula. This is unexplainable.

So for all of Oliver Sachs' writing, about the super intimate details about the lives of patients, he didn't share much about his own life with the public for most of his career. In a 2002 interview, he said that his severe shyness, which he described as a disease, had been a lifelong impediment to his personal relationships. And for most of his life, he lived alone. What were some of the most surprising anecdotes or sort of things you learned

about, what was going on for him and his personal life? One of the most amazing sets of correspondence

that I read was Sachs' letters to this man who lived in Berlin at the time and they had met in Europe. They'd had this like whirlwind romance and then Sachs moved to New York. After a couple weeks, Sachs went back home to New York City and the two start writing to each other. And then their entire sort of affair took place in these letters and they were just like thrilling letters. Each one, it was like Sachs was trying to outdo himself to find new expressions

of like the intensity of his love and his sense that he was merging with this man and that for the first time in his life, he felt at peace with being a gay man. He was seen the world through new eyes. Sachs wrote about these intense feelings. There's a line that describes his happiness. I wonder if you could recall it. My blood is like champagne and then two weeks passed and which he didn't get a letter from this man and suddenly like all of Sachs is kind of euphoria turned in on him

and he started to think like I was delusional like I was part of a two-man delusion. Like this

was never a love. I'm always going to be alone and I always have. The man eventually wrote to a

apologize but for Sachs the damage was done and he was like yeah this is the truth. I will be in a spiritual cell for my entire life and he finally just completely cut off the relationship with this man and then began to feel suicidal which led to him beginning therapy for the next 50 years. After that early relationship, Sachs suffered. He couldn't make friends. He couldn't connect with people. He became celibate and wrote obsessively. Some of his correspondence with other

gay men in the 50s and 60s and 70s and even 80s like the sort of anguished state of being a gay

“man at that time. I think it's easy to almost forget how excruciating it was then and so many”

of the people he was corresponding with. They would be like testing the waters to see if they could reveal to the other one that they were gay. There was so much sort of self-hate and sort of tortured conversation around it 30, 40 years ago felt really alive in his letters as well as his journals just the sense of like self-punishing self-hiding experiences. I could see how he was sort of expressing a feeling of stuckness and life. Was there a moment in the reporting where you

started to realize that his personal life was seeping into the work? So I had read many of his letters. I went back and I did a lot of rereading because it was like the first time I read everything. I didn't know what I was looking for and then there would be times like at one point I was rereading

“awakenings and I remember reading one of the patients describing her blood as being like champagne”

which was striking because you know he asked them phrase he'd used in his letters to this lover from

Berlin. So there were just these kinds of I was always like rhymes between his own descriptions of

himself and his descriptions of his patients. One of the most striking rhymes that she found had to do

you seen that poem before? It was in his letters to describe how he felt when he was trying to write

his first book about migraines and I just remembered that phrase and then I searched through my notes

and I saw another reference where he had also used that phrase in a letter to his therapist.

“So it was clearly an important poem for him in his own self-conceptualization in these moments of crisis.”

The poem evoked something similar to the way sex was feeling in his journals about not being able to express his sexuality and his personal life not being able to connect. And then I was reading awakenings and I was reading the chapter about Leonard who served the star of the book. Leonard played by Robert De Niro in the movie adaptation suffers from asleeping sickness. He lives in a sort of

trans-like state. Sacks gave patients like Leonard a drug called Eldopa which changes the

brain's dopamine levels. In his book awakenings, Sacks writes that Leonard would spell out answers to questions that Sacks asked him because he couldn't speak. I just noticed that he said that Leonard typed out on this like taping board that he felt like the panther and rilks poem. In the movie adaptation, Robin Williams as Oliver Sachs reads that poem. "His gaze from staring through the bars has grown so weary that it can take in nothing more. For him, he says, though there were a thousand bars

and behind the thousand bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles over and over."

I felt like that's a strange coincidence that his patient would happen to sort of cite this poem

that had been so meaningful to Sacks and then I became kind of more attentive to those moments. What was going through your mind as you saw these rhymes as you put it play out? Was there any

“betrayal you felt as a reader seeing this kind of like appear in the records? Yeah, I mean I think”

that made me feel like okay we're like can't trust that any particular detail is true. Did Oliver Sachs know he was fabricating things? Yeah, it was really reading the journals after I had been reading them for a couple of months when I just read a passage where he straight out says I feel like so I can't remember the exact phrasing that he's feeling the sense of criminality and that he feels so guilty for making things out. I would say that a man who

mistook his wife or a hat had a lot of fabrications in it. That book then made him extremely famous and I think he felt a lot like much of the guilt that he expresses in his journals is about that particular book but like the strange thing is when that book was about to be published he wrote his brother and said like you might call these confabulations there's sort of half story half fable half made up he was pretty open about the status so I don't know what happened in the publishing

process somehow these were taken as like case studies that were supposed to be straight fact and he seemed pretty clear early on that that's not what they were at least to himself but suddenly it became like wildly famous and he became this huge figure sack himself says like this was my most flagrant fabrication and it involved these two twins who had autism who were institutionalized and sack said that they were like exchanging prime numbers up to 20 digits

and that finding got a lot of attention because like no one had known this to be human capacity and so psychologists and mathematicians had written about this with some really defending like the importance of this finding and so that felt really like a space where a case study had actually like had an impact and on people's understanding of human capacities

“so I think I tend to agree with sacks that that was the most flagrant moment or transgression”

Rachel's magazine story came out in December of last year and it got people talking I did see people on the internet like putting on putting their own headlines on the piece and sort of making it all about you know he fabricated that kind of felt sad to me because that didn't feel like if I wanted it to be more complicated then just oh let's dismiss all of her sacks he was making stuff up will be back after a short break

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valid for new factor customers with code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase. Make help your eating easy with factor. When you think of the most influential American politician of the 21st century you probably think of a man but there's one woman who might fit to build. She

never thought she'd be in politics but went on to break what she caused the marble sealant.

Then they'd say why don't you just make a list of things that the women want and we'll do those. What? This is in this century. Really? So the marble ceiling. It's not a glass ceiling. It's a marble ceiling and they all had it lined up and you go next and I'll go next and I'll go next and I'll go next and I'll go next and I'll go next and I'll go next and I'll go next and I'll go next and I'll go next. And I'll wait like well you know what we've been waiting over 200 years for breaking in line.

Nancy Pelosi, the long time democratic speaker of the house, live on stage as South by Southwest in Austin. Today explained every week that and now one Saturdays two.

“Is this car nice? Yes. My name is Carol Kirk, I believe you're writing a story about me.”

You talked about how some of the comments that you saw in your piece, the sort of TLDR headline, sacks fabricated stuff, which is true but you also said that was frustrating and I'm wondering why? Something interesting happened where I couldn't like tell you quite who or what, but I felt like there was a contingent of like anti-science people social media. It almost was like oh look this sort of liberal, darling of science, fabricated things. It was like science is a sham.

I guess I also just felt like the takeaway of my story I did not want it to be just oh my god let's like throw sacks at the window he fabricated things and so that seemed like there was some of that going on and I was sad about that but like it's within this like much larger context of like one man sort of struggle you know during the time when he was fabricating a lot of other sort of

“literary stars were doing similar things so it's also within a historical context but yeah I think”

there are moments in which to me it was almost the projection that was most striking like taking phrases

think about how those fabrications or those sort of exaggerations feel revealing of dynamics

in the way we respond to this kind of writing and the way the other people respond to it and the kind of expectations we have for like what empathy as a writer looks like.

“I think it's more about this genre of writing that he inspired this sort of telling tells about”

illness that are kind of supposed to inspire or show you like the secret gift of your illness. I think like if anything I would want it to inspire like more kind of thinking about the relationship between like a writer and a subject and particularly a sort of doctor and the patient subject

and how much of ourselves we bring on to that encounter sometimes without realizing sometimes.

Do you know how any of his patients felt about his rendering of them? Leonard's family loved him. They didn't necessarily think the book was all accurate but they were just so grateful for the time and the care that he had put into that relationship like the families of that Leonard and his mother just adored him and the other patients I talked to as well really adored him. They didn't fundamentally care you know about like how they were

written about in this book with a cared about was that there was this doctor who was like sitting with them for hours trying to understand them and making them feel like they were someone who had a story to tell. A huge part of sex is life that Rachel's story eliminates was his ongoing struggle with his sexuality. After that early relationship in Berlin he lived on happily closeted and celibate for decades. You unpack some of his battles in therapy and how some of that was getting

worked out in the writing at one point in the piece you suggest that sex spent much of his life searching for love. He once wrote, "We spend our lives searching for what we have lost and one day perhaps we will suddenly find it." I just wonder what you make of that as you were sort of seeing these patterns crop up in the work. I mean that idea that in therapy you're like working through

“I like that phrase working through because I think like probably most writers choose subjects”

to some degree because they're working through ideas that are like important or problematic to them and then they sort of displace it on to these other subjects where they're working through and it felt like he was like rehearsing this narrative which was someone who is trapped in this cell, the sort of spiritual cell, the sense of being in a cage, suddenly is kind of released and has this awakening and many of his stories have that arc and so then it was striking to see.

I mean it was almost like the longed for outcome that he keeps sort of playing out in his work. Do you think about what you do as a reporter any differently after learning about sort of how sex identified with his subjects do you think differently about what you do at all?

“I think it was like part of like a longer conversation with myself as I age as a writer,”

my curiosity's change and my identification's change and so therefore like when I'm writing a story about a family for instance like I'm going to I might actually change the kinds of questions I'm looking at because of where I am in life or I find that I'm often like writing about people with complicated relationships to work and that's because I'm there's a question I have

about my own relationship to work or so yes I think like writing is always a kind of working through

and in a way I think that if it's not a working through it's less rich like if you're writing about something about which you have no sort of unsettled questions and curiosity is then then the writing can be flatter for it so I think you do want some of that kind of like identification and projection energy but it can be taken way too far and too far in own ethical ways and in really problematic ways so it feels like a subject that does have

stakes in my life and in sort of any kind of writing. He was a physician treating them and a writer observing them and I wonder if if anything came up for you in terms of like that split role. Yeah I mean I think there was some like problematic like already laying type stuff going on where

it was almost like he was bringing their psychosis to full fruition so that he could gain more insights

about the nature of madness and sex actually writes about that to that kind of guilt that like some of his patients with Tourette syndrome he would like want their texts to reach sort of tick as to become floorly symptomatic essentially because he felt like in that process he as the writer and the researcher was sort of gaining more insight into the nature of the disease

“and I think he like told himself that that could be good for the patient while also sort of”

realizing it was fundamentally like you know helping his project. After he had become famous

for books like Awakening and the man who mistook his wife for a hat sacked at this interview in 1989

with a reporter from PBS. A hundred years from now how would you like to be remembered? I would like it to be thought that I had listened carefully to what patients and others had told me that I tried to imagine what it was like for them and that I tried to convey this and to use a biblical term the feeling he bore with us. I think like bearing witness in medicine has come to me like you are sort of present in someone's moment of suffering to allow them to feel the

they are seen and they are heard and that they're not alone and that you're kind of like doing this thing where you're not turning away like other people it's just too hard. This idea of bearing witness is very kind of central in medical humanities but I don't know that you can all you can bear witness and also like write a story about some of those are two very different acts and I think sex was sort of merging them both and presenting a model of how both can be merged

and there's a lot of self-interest involved or not self-interest but sort of you have like a your mind is doing calculating things when you're thinking about how someone becomes a story

“and when you're bearing witness I think you need to be blank in a way that you probably can't”

be as sort of an authorial like imagination. Sax said he wanted to be remembered as someone who bore witness and I get that but I also think that it is very hard to do that when you're like telling a sort of magical fable about someone's illness and sort of the gifts that it might have bestowed upon them. What I find so fascinating about this story is that there's all over sax the doctor and Oliver Sax the writer and Oliver Sax the man and what happens when all of those

versions of Sax collide into each other. I think anyone would kind of say that one of the genius things he did was to see all these patients who were in like Komato states and other doctors had dismissed them and he saw something in them like he felt a sense of identification because he also saw himself as like the living bed and someone who'd been buried alive these

“were words that he used. I think he was capable of imagining that there was like a real person.”

There was like a real consciousness, a real lively intelligence like sucked away by this illness inside these people and so he spent enough time with them to realize that that was true. So I think like part of that identification and projection like allowed him to make the discoveries he made

and then the second half of that was that the projection and the identification sort of obscured

the specificity and possibly like the suffering of what they were going through because he kind of made their lives beautiful. I'm curious like how we turn our own emptiness in our life into art and what the costs of that are how we manage that. Through that process of bearing witness to other people, Sax was also working through something in himself. I was also like moved by his honesty and the pain of kind of trying to figure that out himself. Everyone like high things from

themselves but I felt like he really was trying to sort of figure out like both justify it and flagulate himself for it. By 2008 Oliver Sax had met someone another writer. His name was Bill Hayes.

at the end of his life. He falls in love and I just loved that you could find love at age 76.

“He was so stuck for all those years. He couldn't come out for all those years. He was doing his best”

to try and it just yeah that that felt like sort of I guess tragic but beautiful in a way like just that that sheer effort to sort of understand yourself even if you really can't.

This episode was produced by me Amy Padulla. It was edited by Julio Lungoria with help from

Joanna Salotarraff, mixing and sound design from Christian Isla and music from Nolem Hassenfeld. Melissa Hirsch checked the facts. Jorge Just is our editorial director. Sally Helm and Meredith Hodgnot are two of all the great poet laureates of unexplainable. And Bird Pinkerton sat on the A train as it barrel towards Washington Heights. She figured someone might think she looked weird

“or something. She had a broken platypus guitar on her back and octopus key around her neck”

and a boomerang sticking out of her pocket. But nope. Just a normal day on the subway.

As always thank you to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with Nolem and Bird.

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show, those things make a real difference. Unexplainable is part of the box media podcast network. We'll be back soon with another episode about everything we don't yet know. , so you're the best player in this school. You're just a bit of a rat and then you're a student. No, no, no. I'm not like a player in my own space. Do you think all of that? Yeah, exactly. Like a player in the studio, a job or a job. I'm not like a player in the lead.

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