The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Dictated letter by letter through one eyelid after a stroke. A mind intact inside a body that will not move.
The memoir records the months after a stroke left Bauby with locked-in syndrome: conscious and lucid, able to move only his left eyelid. A therapist recites a frequency-ordered alphabet and he blinks to fix each letter, so the text is assembled one word at a time. It moves between his room at the Berck-sur-Mer hospital and the interior he still commands, setting memories of food, travel and his children beside close observation of the nurses, visitors and routines that gather around a body which no longer answers.
Bauby holds the failed body apart from the mind that watches it, and tracks what dependence does to a person: the grief for the man he was, the small humiliations of being washed and fed, the guilt and tenderness bound up with people he can no longer reach or hold. The writing stays precise and often wry rather than pleading. Leggatt's English translation was published by Fourth Estate in 1997, shortly after Bauby died at forty-four.
About the author
Jean-Dominique Bauby
Jean-Dominique Bauby (1952 to 1997) was a French journalist who became editor-in-chief of the Paris edition of Elle magazine in 1991. In December 1995 he suffered a stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome, fully conscious but almost entirely paralysed, able to move only his left eyelid. He composed his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by blinking to select letters as a partner recited the alphabet aloud. He died in March 1997, days after its publication.
Details
- 1997
- French
- Fourth Estate
- Fourth Estate
- 9780008610036