From the Archives: Newlyweds Survive a Severe Stroke.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: OCTOBER 08, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 100801np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: "My Year Off": Robert McCrum's Recovery From A Stroke
Sect: Medical
Time: 12:06

BARBARA BOGAEV, GUEST HOST: I'm Barbara Bogaev, filling in for Terry Gross.

On today's FRESH AIR, life after a stroke. We'll hear from Robert McCrum, who, at the age of 42, suffered a stroke that left him temporarily paralyzed on his left side. It struck as he was at the height of his profession as editor-in-chief of the publishing giant Faber and Faber, and just two months newly married.

We'll hear from him and his wife, Sarah Lyall, a reporter for "The New York Times." McCrum has written about their ordeal in "My Year Off: Recovering Life After a Stroke."

Also, Maureen Corrigan has a review of "Stiffed," Susan Faludi's new book about the betrayal of the American man.

That's all coming up on today's FRESH AIR.

First, the news.

(NEWSBREAK)

BOGAEV: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev, in for Terry Gross.

Robert McCrum was the 42-year-old editor-in-chief of the British publishing company Faber and Faber when he had a stroke in the summer of 1995. McCrum's memoir of this time in his life, called "My Year Off," is about his slow recovery and how the stroke changed his self-identity, his work, and his marriage.

He had been married only two months. His wife, Sarah Lyall, who had covered publishing for "The New York Times," moved to his city, London, when they got married. They were still adjusting to their new lives together when the stroke changed everything. Sarah Lyall kept a journal of what she experienced during his recovery. Excerpts of her journal are included in the book.

McCrum has regained much but not all of his movement on his left side. He's now literary editor of the London newspaper "The Observer." His memoir, "My Year Off," is just out in paperback.

Last fall, Terry spoke with Robert McCrum and Sarah Lyall about the aftereffects of the stroke on their lives and their marriage.

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Robert, what did you think was happening when you came to after you had the stroke?

ROBERT McCRUM, LITERARY EDITOR, "THE OBSERVER"; AUTHOR: Well, I think my first thought -- I mean, it's a long time ago, and I was very confused, of course -- was that I had some kind of brain tumor or motor neuron disease. I really had no knowledge of stroke.

GROSS: What were you experiencing?

McCRUM: I was kind of drifting in and out of consciousness. There was no fear, there was no pain.

GROSS: And there was very little movement. I think your whole left side was paralyzed.

McCRUM: My whole left side was completely paralyzed. But there was something in my brain which kicked in which stopped me from -- I mean, if I knew then what I know now about stroke, I would have been terrified. But I wasn't. I was actually -- I was confused, I was puzzled, I was perplexed. But that was about it, really.

GROSS: So you needed to call for help, and you couldn't move enough to get to a telephone. How did you finally get to the phone?

McCRUM: And I had to crawl my -- I had to crawl downstairs from the bedroom to the -- I -- what happened was I -- when the left side -- when your body is paralyzed, your body becomes very heavy. And I worked my way to the edge of the bed, which is a raised brass bed, to try to reach the phone on the bedside table.

As I'd reached across, I'd fallen out of bed onto the floor. So now I was under the table, and I couldn't reach the phone. But I knew there was a phone downstairs, and so I spent 12 hours of a whole day getting down, (INAUDIBLE) making my way down the stairs to the downstairs living room to reach the phone to call my mother, who was expecting to meet me that day anyway, in Cambridge, which is some two hours from the middle of London.

GROSS: So the emergency people were called, the door was broken in, you were taken to the hospital. And everything was different afterwards.

Sarah, where were you when you heard about your husband's stroke?

SARAH LYALL, JOURNALIST, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": Well, unfortunately, I was in San Francisco at the time on assignment. And it was quite an alarming day for me because we had been recently married, so it was our first time apart, and we were sort of telephoning each other every six hours or so because of the time difference. And I hadn't been able to get hold of him for hours and hours and hours, and I was really getting quite concerned.

GROSS: And so you flew home as soon as -- what, his family had told you what had happened?

LYALL: Yes, I had called his mother in some panic after about, I don't know, about 12 or 18 hours of not being able to get ahold of him. And I left my number. And his mother called me back and sort of said in her understated English way, "Robert's not very well."

And then she said, "And he can't move," and I had no idea what this meant except that it was very serious. And I would -- I think in the back of my mind maybe I thought this what happens when you have a stroke. But I didn't really know. So I just rushed to the hospital -- to the airport and got on the next plane.

GROSS: Robert, you write that at first, after the stroke, you experienced the exhilaration of having survived. But after that exhilaration, then depression set in.

McCRUM: It's a very odd thing. I mean, the first thing that happened -- I mean, once I became aware that I had nearly died and that I was still alive, I was, of course, incredibly thrilled still to be alive. The world's an incredibly precious and incredibly wonderful. It's hard to convey how bright the colors of the world seem, you know, and everything just seemed so gloriously fresh and new.

I felt like Miranda in "The Tempest," you know, a brave new world. And that lasted for a week or two, and then the physical side of the stroke began to kick in into the brain, and I became very depressed.

GROSS: And Sarah, you write about the impact of that depression on you, and the fears that are brought out in you. One of your fears was that your husband was becoming a different person. You didn't even know him that well, because you had only been married a couple of months. You'd known each other about a year before that, but it was a long-distance relationship because you lived in the States and he lived in England.

I want to -- I want you to read an excerpt from your diary that's reprinted in the memoir. This is about the fears that you had early on about the way Robert was changing.

LYALL: Sure. This came about a week after it happened.

"I feel shattered. It's been hell, and with each day a fresh round of horror to deal with. Robert's stroke is really quite severe. Nine days into it, he still can't move his left arm and his left leg. And his speech is quite thick and stuttery because he's numb on the left side of his face.

"His mind isn't affected, but he's so very depressed and so very exhausted that it's torture spending time with him. I'm so relieved he's not dead. I'm so scared he'll have to be in a wheelchair. I'm so scared that what we've had together, the wonderful flushes of first love, but hardly years of time built up together to cushion blows like this, will all evaporate now and our life together will never be good again.

"I'm scared that what we've had will evaporate for him, that he'll remember it as some distant flash of memory. And what we'll have to do now is get know each other again in a new way filled with this bitterness."

GROSS: You write in there that it was torture spending time with him because he was so depressed. Was that something you only would admit to in the diary?

LYALL: Yes. I think one of the hard things for me at that time was I had to sort of quell all these fears and frustrations that I had, and act as a sort of a cheerleader for him, and make it seem when I came into the room that I was thrilled to see him. Which, of course, I was thrilled to see him. I really enjoyed spending time with him even when he was in the hospital.

But I had to be enthusiastic and say, You've made such progress, and Don't you look well, and, Let's, you know, get up and do things today and get you out of here. And that was very, very hard to do.

GROSS: It's interesting reading the book, because, Sarah, your part of the journal talks about, you know, how hard it was, how depressed he was, how worried you were. And, Robert, your part talks about, And Sarah came in this morning, and she was so cheerful. What optimism!

McCRUM: I can still picture her striding in clutching the papers and my clothes and God knows what from the night before. And always very positive and fresh and funny, and just a ray of sunshine, really.

GROSS: But it sounds like there are times, Robert, when you'd get really angry at her in the way that I think a lot of people who are sick get angry at the people who they love the most, who are closest with them, and they're the only people around who they can lash out at.

McCRUM: Well, this is an attempt to provide the kind of worm's eye -- an insider's view of what it's like to be very seriously ill.

GROSS: Exactly.

McCRUM: And so I just put in all -- and it's all there, you know. And the fact is that when you are seriously ill, you do feel enraged by the failure of your body.

And you -- and the people that -- as you say, the people that you lash out at are the people that are closest to you. And so I'd lash out at my parents and Sarah, and, you know, anybody -- not all the time by any means, but there were certainly days, there were black days when you became very distressed, I think, by -- didn't you? By my...

LYALL: Well, it was very upsetting because I felt, like, here I was and I was trying to help you and I was trying to be positive when I didn't feel very positive. And I understood absolutely why Robert would be so angry.

But I didn't even know him well enough to sort of have mechanisms to deal with it. It was very, very frightening, because his anger is something to behold.

GROSS: Were you both worried that you didn't know each other that well, because you hadn't been married that long, and you were both being transformed by this experience?

McCRUM: Well, it's certainly true that stroke generally is a real -- you know, the words that go with stroke are divorce and separation. It's a real relationship breaker. On the other hand, if you can survive it, which we did, I think we -- I mean, we found it -- we -- it became a way of bringing us closer together it kind of fused our -- forged our relationship, brought us very close together.

But of course, once you've been reduced to the condition of a baby in front of your loved one, Sarah, you know, there's nowhere to hide, really. You know, you are completely -- I was completely dependent upon her, and I needed her for everything. And so that there was no -- there was none of the usual barriers that one would have as an adult.

And she'd -- you know, she'd see me in extremis, in the worst possible situation, and the most dependent situation, and I was relying on that. And so she was able to take up her part of the relationship.

GROSS: Sarah, I'm wondering if you were worried about just seeing your husband in such a kind of sick and weakened dependent state would change your image of him.

LYALL: That's such an interesting question, because I've really been thinking about that lately, and that when you first meet someone and then get married as quickly as we did -- we had only known each other for a year and a half when we got married. And a lot of what it is at that point is a sort of glorified image of them.

You idealize the person, and some of the things that I liked about him were how vigorous he was, how well he could cope with situations. He'd sort of stride into a room and take charge. I felt sort of pathetically, you know, he could take care of me. And all of a sudden that was all gone. And I think I had to work very hard to sort of tell myself that this was cosmetic and that wasn't really the essence of who he was. And that probably would have gone away eventually over time anyway.

It just had to happen much more quickly, and we had to forge a new relationship very, very early that wasn't based on a lot of the things that our courtship and marriage had been based on.

GROSS: When Robert was very depressed, Sarah, did you have any sense that this was, like, a symptom of the stroke? Did the -- were the doctors talking to you about the emotional impact?

LYALL: Yes, the doctors said very early on that depression was often a physical side effect of the stroke, that since the stroke alters the chemistry in your brain, often it would hit the little section that controls mood. And, of course, you do have something very real to be depressed about when you're lying there so helpless.

But that was very hard because he isn't someone who would necessarily talk about his feelings anyway. He was so exhausted that he didn't have the strength to have a long conversation. It was really a long time before I was able even to get a clear picture from him of what actually had happened the day that I was away and he was ill by himself. So that was extremely frustrating. I felt for a while like I was doing the talking for both of us.

GROSS: Robert, did you realize that you were depressed?

McCRUM: Only afterwards. At the time, I was -- I can't -- I'm trying to recapture my mood, I was just very sad. I mean, and I was very self-absorbed. I was thinking, you know, Why me, why me, why me, why me, all the time. And then gradually, as time went on over a period of weeks, the Why me? became, Since me, or, If me. And then the "since me" bit became the book, really. Since this has happened, what can I do with it?

GROSS: You know, you mention self-absorption. I think, in a way, self-absorption is one of symptoms of disease, because you can't kind of get out into the world, you can't escape your condition. And, you know, the doctors and nurses are always coming in to check on you, asking about everything from, you know, how you feel, to if you've moved your bowels. So -- and, I mean, everybody's encouraging you to be self-absorbed.

McCRUM: Very intrusive, yes, they are, yes, the invitation is to be -- is to turn in on yourself, which, of course, when you're paralyzed you have to do anyway. All you can do is think. But I never had so much time to lie -- you know, I was lying in bed on my back for three months thinking about me and about my place in the world, about Sarah and my family.

GROSS: Were those productive thoughts?

McCRUM: I think so. I mean, the book partly reflects that. But I think they were productive, and I think it was like a punctuation mark in the course of a very, very busy life. And it was a chance, you know, to take stock of what was valuable to me and what was important.

And I think, you know, we all have this dream of leaving, this dream of leaving our lives behind for a moment, you know, going and living in the countryside or by the sea, or going around the world traveling. And I discovered that I was going -- making a journey into the interior of myself stuck in hospital. And so in that sense it was productive.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guests are Robert McCrum and Sarah Lyall. And Robert McCrum is now the literary editor of the "The Observer" in England, former editor-in- chief of the publishing company Faber and Faber.

He had a stroke a few years ago and has written a memoir about that, and part of the memoir are excerpts of his wife's journals from the period. And she is Sarah Lyall, who writes from London for "The New York Times."

Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guests are Robert McCrum and Sarah Lyall. Robert McCrum has written a memoir about his stroke a few years ago. Included in there are excerpts of his wife's, Sarah Lyall's, journals from the period. He is now literary editor of "The Observer" in England. Sarah Lyall writes from England for "The New York Times."

Sarah, in your journal you write that, you know, Robert's spirits would go up and down, he was unable to express what he was feeling. You would try to anticipate what he might be thinking and verbally beat it out of him, and then you'd end up feeling wretched and bossy and peremptory.

And I think you put your finger on something that nearly everyone goes through who has taken care of somebody who is sick and depressed because of it. You know, you want to, like, force them to take their medicine or to do their exercises or, you know, to be in a better mood.

And then you start to think like you're pushing them around or they tell you that you're pushing them around. And it's just hard to figure out what the balance is of trying to keep your loved one on the straight and narrow to recovery, and then just kind of easing up and not being what could be perceived as a real nudge.

LYALL: That's right. And in Robert's case, probably, it was a little bit worse, because he's incredibly stubborn and he really, really hates being told what to do. I think it's a function of his British upbringing, being sent away to boarding school when he was young, and having so many rules and regulations to follow. And he rebelled in his mind against all that stuff and sort of vowed never again would he listen to anyone who told him what to do.

And here I was ordering him around all day long, and it was a situation I didn't want to be in. I don't want to order somebody around. That's not the kind of relationship we expected to have, and I really hated it.

McCRUM: But you had to do it because it was very important for me to do the physiotherapy, and to do, you know, all of the recovery procedures that we were going through. And I was so tired. I mean, I think one of the things which nobody talks about much is the fatigue, I mean, the terrible fatigue, you know, unbearable fatigue, which would just swamp everything. And everything you wanted, even sitting in a chair as I am now, would be exhausting.

GROSS: Were the doctors able to predict what your degree of recovery would be?

McCRUM: That was one of the very frustrating areas. One of the problems with stroke is that because you can't open up the brain and examine it in the way that you can a heart or liver, say, very easily -- I mean, you can photograph it and you can open it in that way, but you can't open it and examine the causes of its breakdown.

They -- the doctors aren't able to pinpoint exactly what's happened. And the contract between the doctor and the patient traditionally is that the doctor will cure patient by drugs or surgery. Having diagnosed the problem, they would then apply drugs or surgery to the problem and cure it. That's the contract between the patient and a doctor.

With strokes, you can't have that, that can't happen. And so in absence of a clear diagnosis, although they would provide a clear account, it couldn't be an exact explanation of what had happened. They fall back on these very vague generalizations, on the whole, worst-case scenarios.

And so you'll be told that your left arm -- in my case, my left arm might get better -- it is actually now more or less OK -- that my left -- that I might -- that I may be able to walk, perhaps, in a year or two's time. Possibly this, possibly the other. And so it's very frustrating for the patient, because you feel there's no hope. Because nobody's saying, you know, By such and such a date, you're going to be better. They never give you a clear answer.

GROSS: What kind of stroke did you have? What part of the brain did it strike?

McCRUM: It struck me in an area called the basal ganglia, which controls the tongue and speech. One of the reasons why I now have a slight stammer is to do with this. I mean, I always had a slight stammer, but it's got worse since -- I believe it's got worse because of the stroke. And it was mixture of -- it was called -- it's called a hemorrhagic infarct, which is a mixture of bleed and a clot.

Essentially, it was ultimately probably the failure of one of the arteries of the brain, very deep within the brain, which on the MRI scan you can see quite clearly, but hard to identify from the outside.

GROSS: For a lot of people, these near-death experiences are a time for rethinking your relationship to religion, your belief in God, if you have one. Some people lose their faith, some people gain their faith or regain their faith. I'm wondering if either of you experienced any shifts in your sense of...

McCRUM: Well, I want to answer that in this way. I mean, I think that -- I didn't experience -- I mean, I was asked on so many occasions my friends and relatives whether I had met God. And God didn't speak -- I mean, every day I'd be wheeled out in my wheelchair down the hallway of this old Victorian hospital in London. And on the way out into the square outside to sit in the sunshine, and the wheelchair would squeak its way past down the corridor past the Victorian chapel.

And on one occasion, I remember the nurse said, Don't you want to go into the chapel? And I said, Sure. So we went in there and we sat in front of the altar in the chapel. It was -- all there was a smell of disinfectant and the kind of -- the emptiness of a Victorian chapel.

And I remember looking up at the cross and thinking, you know, Now's the time for a revelation of some kind. And nothing happened. On the other hand, I think that -- I mean, this book is a kind of love letter to Sarah, and if God is love, then I did find some kind of God.

GROSS: Sarah, did you ask yourself whether you should be experiencing any changes and in your feelings about God or religion?

LYALL: I felt so panicked that I didn't really feel that I could turn to anything to help. I did find myself, weirdly, praying.

GROSS: Just in case.

LYALL: Just in case. And I would sort of sit in bed and I'd say, Well, please, let me just tell you about Robert and let me tell you what he's like, and please don't waste this person. You know, let him come back. And I -- there was one point where I mentioned in my journal, I think, where I say, you know, I'm praying to a God that I don't really believe exists. And maybe that's the point about God, is, He lets you pray to Him even if you don't believe in Him. So there's a little bit of me that I'm not sure.

McCRUM: Also, I think that -- you know, I think if there was a God who we turned to, it's the God of the English language, the God of the written word. We both turned to childhood books that we both loved, "Alice in Wonderland," "Charlotte's Web," "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," books of that kind. And these were -- and these stories with their wonderful expressions and language were the things which we came back to again and again.

(END AUDIOTAPE)

BOGAEV: Robert McCrum and Sarah Lyall spoke with Terry Gross last year. McCrum's memoir is "My Year Off." We'll hear more of their conversation in the second half of the show.

I'm Barbara Bogaev, and this is FRESH AIR.

BOGAEV: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev, in for Terry Gross.

Let's get back to Terry's interview with Robert McCrum and his wife, Sarah Lyall.

Robert McCrum suffered a stroke in the summer of 1995. His memoir of the experience and his recovery is called "My Year Off." McCrum and Sarah Lyall had only been married for two months at the time of the stroke. Excerpts from Lyall's journal entries from this time are included in the book.

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

GROSS: Robert, you worked in publishing at the time of your stroke, and now review books and are literary editor of "The Observer" in London. You know a lot of people in the literary world, and a lot of them came to visit you while you were in the hospital.

And you write that your visitors, you know, included your true friends, compassion junkies, hypochondriacs, and people who welcomed the chance to address a captive audience. I think that's just a great description. Why do hypochondriacs come visit you when you're in the hospital?

McCRUM: Well, I think the old confusion thing of the pleasure of seeing somebody falling off the roof, the pleasure of seeing somebody else being seriously ill. It kind of reinforced their sense of wellness to see somebody else who was worse off than themselves, I think. I don't quite know, but it's probably...

GROSS: That's probably it. That was probably it. So how would you react to that, if you got the feeling that somebody was there just so that you'd make them feel better about themselves?

McCRUM: Well, I mean, I was so kind of spaced out anyway. I mean, I was just glad to see them. But there were some funny moments. People would come -- the other thing that happens in hospital is, if you're very seriously ill, because there's a chance in the mind of the person comes to see you that you might not make it, that they confess things.

I mean, people told me things about affairs with other people, marital stuff, and, you know, financial things, personal things. I was told some incredible secrets by these people I now meet, and I occasionally want to say, you know, By the way, you told me this, that, or the other. And I'm still here, and, you know, I know what you told me. There's one person in particular in London who confessed a whole bunch of things, which he really shouldn't have done.

And so there is -- there's a kind -- the atmosphere of being in bed with somebody sitting next to you, when you've been -- And I think it's also people want to bring something -- they want to bring -- I think the thing about pain is that when you've experienced pain, you find that there's a lot of pain out there, and the pain comes to you, and people share their pain with you, because they feel that you're somehow -- figure you understand the pain that's in the world.

GROSS: Also, it just feels really wrong somehow to visit someone who is in great pain in the hospital and tell them how great your vacation was.

McCRUM: Yes, although people did that. There was one case of actually an American friend of ours who came in and, basically, for half an hour, what a great time he'd had, you know, in America during the summer. We sat there -- Sarah and I sat there kind of aghast at this person.

He went on at some length about how, you know, he traveled here and there and there, this, that, and the other, he'd done this and this and this. He didn't once, not once, ask me how I felt or what had gone on or anything. But yet, you know, he -- on the other hand, I can't think ill of him because he was actually come -- he did actually to see us. But it was a kind of bizarre moment.

GROSS: I guess that would fit into the category of the people who love a captive audience.

McCRUM: Yes, yes, there are a few of that (ph).

GROSS: You write that Salman Rushdie was the visitor who most put aside his own problems and focused on yours.

McCRUM: Well, I always think well of Salman after this. I mean, because, you know, he'd been in prison, effectively, for a long time, and was under great threat, or had been under great threat. And the hospital I was in was actually favored by Arabs, on the whole, victims of Arab car crashes and the paraplegic victims. So the lobby of the hospital was always full of Arabs in robes.

And so for Salman to come and visit me in hospital was -- meant he had to walk through this crowded lobby, get into the elevator, and come up to my room. And you might think that somebody who'd been in that situation, the situation that he was in, would be unable to shake off his own personal story.

But he was incredibly sweet. You know, he held by hand, he read from his new book to me -- he -- which I couldn't hold a book in my hand, because my left hand was not working. And he read aloud to me, and he asked me how I was, and he was incredibly sweet.

GROSS: Did he wear a disguise?

McCRUM: No. In fact, one of my nurses came in afterwards and said, That was Salman Rushdie wasn't it? In a very -- like a conspiratorial whisper.

GROSS: We should mention that you lived -- you might still live in the house that he had used to live in.

McCRUM: Yes, we -- I bought this house from him -- that's how we'd became friends -- in the early '90s, and we've actually moved, partly because of the result of the traumatic experiences that we had there about a year ago. But, yes, we did live in his house, and he is a friend. And he was a very -- he was very good to us both when I was sick.

GROSS: Sarah, in some ways you had to be like the intermediary with the doctors. I mean, I think it's often the person who is well who can walk into a hallway with a doctor and say, Come on, tell me the real story. And the things that are too complicated for the exhausted patient to understand, you know, the loved one can understand.

What was the -- would you compare for us what it was like to deal with doctors in England compared to what you were used to with American doctors? Was there any difference?

LYALL: I think in England they are a bit behind us in terms of treating patients like consumers. There's a sense more than I've experienced in America, although I haven't had a lot of experience with illness in America, that doctors are kind of experts, they're above you, they understand. And you, the kind of little wormlike patient below, shouldn't be bothered with the details of it.

It was incredibly frustrating for me, because I felt they treated me with quite a bit of arrogance, I think is probably compounded by the fact that we were dealing with a lot of neurologists who aren't necessarily known for their bedside manner and their ability to describe in simple terms what was going on.

Having said that, we had some incredibly thoughtful, nice doctors who really did their best. But it was in general a pretty frustrating experience.

GROSS: Sarah, when Robert came home from the hospital and you had to figure out what your new lives together were going to be like, did you -- how much work were you able to do when -- where did you draw the line about, Well, I still have to earn a living, I still have to keep up my work, versus, I want to really be home and take care of him?

LYALL: Well, it -- throughout the whole thing my work was incredibly important to me as a kind of way out. It was my little place that I kept to myself where I would forget, if I possibly could, what had happened. So for the first few months, I was essentially spending my mornings with him, working in the afternoon, and then spending my evenings with him. And that was when he was in the hospital and right when he came home.

But what we didn't really realize is when he came home he was in such worse shape than he would be later on, we both sort of worried, I think, those first months after he returned from the hospital, that that was sort of it. He would never get any better than he was then. And that was incredibly frightening, the sort of sense that, you know, life would stretch out, the years would come and go, and it would never be better. But it got better quite quickly.

GROSS: And why did it get better so quickly? Was that just a natural healing process?

McCRUM: Well, the body began to come back, began to -- you know, the pathways in the brain began, you know, to open up, and I was able to -- I beginning to be able to walk again with a cane, and I was able to, you know, slowly get back to my old way of life. I mean, at the time it seemed interminable. When I look at the book now and see the passage of time, in the book it's only two or three months, but at the time it just seemed like an eternity.

(END AUDIOTAPE)

BOGAEV: Robert McCrum and Sarah Lyall spoke with Terry last fall. McCrum's memoir, "My Year Off," is out in paperback.

We'll hear more after the break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

BOGAEV: Let's return to Terry's interview with Robert McCrum, literary editor of the London newspaper "The Observer," and his wife, Sarah Lyall, who writes for "The New York Times." McCrum has written a memoir about his recovery from a stroke.

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

GROSS: When you had your stroke, Robert, you had been the editor-in-chief of the British publishing house Faber and Faber, which is a very respected house. In your memoir you write, after your stroke, your "half-baked wish" about your old life had come true, "I could no longer function as the editor-in-chief of Faber and Faber."

Why was that something you had half-wished for, a way out of the job?

McCRUM: Well, I suppose I had done it for 20 years, since my early 20s, essentially the same job for a long time, and I was weary of it. It was very, very tiring and exhausting. People who don't know about strokes would ask whether the stroke was caused by overwork. I don't think it was caused by that, actually.

But it was very tiring, and it was becoming stressful. The climate of publishing had changed a lot in England, as it has here. And it wasn't as much fun, and I wasn't enjoying it as much. And I kind of I wanted a new challenge. I felt in a way as though I'd achieved what I could achieve in that job, and I wanted a new opportunity.

GROSS: When you say that your half-baked wish had come true, were you half-hoping for a way off of the treadmill of the job that you had?

McCRUM: Well, I think the stroke -- and I can't really explain what caused the stroke, but there's no question that it did provide a punctuation mark in a busy life. And I think that some -- in some kind of deep psychological way it did answer a kind of inner prayer of some kind, that I wanted to change. It was like a forcible stop.

GROSS: Robert, you write that in your old life as a fit person you had become a monster of irresponsibility. For years, you say, you had lived for your freedom. In what way had you become a monster? How are you a monster, Robert?

McCRUM: Interesting question. I think I was just living for myself and just doing whatever I wanted to do. In that sense, I had become monstrously egotistical and monstrously selfish, and was always looking for a new -- another trip abroad, another frisson of some kind, and really at a cost of not paying attention to people close to me.

And I think that the effect of the stroke was to make me much closer to what really mattered -- my family, my friends, and, of course, Sarah.

GROSS: I'm sure when you were working before the stroke that you really valued speed -- a writer who could get the book out on time, you know, the printer who could get it out quickly, everything as, you know, as fast as possible. And then you were forced to slow down. Did your values change about the value of speed and so on?

GROWN: I think the value -- yes, I think, you know -- I've written in the book that I became friends with slowness. And I that's one of the consequences, generally speaking, of the illness has been that I'm much more appreciative of taking it slowly. And of course, yes, publishing is all about getting things on deadline, as is journalism. And those pressures were ones which drove me, you know, at ever-increasing speed in all directions.

GROSS: You still have some of those pressures, because you write a column for the "Observer."

McCRUM: I do, yes, I do, I write for "The Observer" in London. But that's a Sunday paper, and it comes out once a week, and so the pressures aren't quite as intense. And in fact, I think I work less hard now than I did before, but I'm sure I do.

The work of the editor-in-chief of a major publishing house is very -- it's just nonstop. You never really leave the job. Even when you go home, you know, you're carrying manuscripts with you. You're on the -- reached by the -- on the phone by your authors. It was often very pleasant, but it's -- you're always available for consultation. As a journalist, when you go home -- unless a big story -- as a literary journalist, I should say -- when you go home, unless a big story breaks, you're free to read and do whatever you want.

GROSS: Sarah, how did you deal with the fact that I'm sure your life slowed down too? And you still had deadlines to meet, and you can't just say to "The New York Times," Well, sorry, you know, personal crisis again today.

LYALL: Well, that was OK. I mean, once he got home, you know, we could at least organize ourselves. I would know what my schedule would be. It wasn't as if he would call me at work and I'd have to rush home. It wasn't that sort of illness. So that sort of worked out all right.

It was obviously very disappointing to have my first year of married life be so sort of circumscribed by my husband's illness. And that was sort of hard. I mean, we spent a lot of time together doing essentially nothing that year. I loved spending the time with him, but it was sort of not what we'd bargained for when we first met.

GROSS: There was a period when Robert couldn't do anything around the house because he was disabled from the stroke. And then, Robert, I'm sure as you got better you were able to take on more chores. So, Sarah, how much did you want to kind of want to push him into, Well, I think, you know, you're able to wash the dishes now, you're able to maybe cook an omelet this morning?

LYALL: It was so hard, because, of course, all married couples go through that kind of thing anyway.

GROSS: Exactly.

LYALL: And here I was, he's a bit older than me. I'm 34, he's 10 years older. He's English, so there's a lot more of a traditional role thing going on in England than in America. And we were having the same fights a lot of my friends were having with their husbands, only in this different way. He had this great excuse, Well, I'm kind of...

McCRUM: I had the moral high ground. I was very seriously ill, and I -- So I can't do the washing up, can I, darling?

LYALL: No. But what we both found, it's very easy to become an invalid. When we had our baby, I was in the hospital for a week. I had a caesarean. And I loved having people bring me things on trays and sort of ask me if I was all right and that kind of thing. And part of what Robert had to cope with coming out of the hospital is psychologically losing that impulse to be an invalid. He had to really give that up, and in some ways it was hard for him. He'd been in the hospital for three months doing nothing for himself.

McCRUM: Being waited on hand and foot.

LYALL: Yes. So we had to really work through that, and I would say we're probably still working through it now.

GROSS: You have a baby who's about 20 months old. Had you planned on having a baby before the stroke? Was it something you already knew you wanted to do?

LYALL: We knew we wanted children. I think we probably ended up having her a bit earlier than what we had bargained for. When Robert got out of the hospital, quite understandably, he was pretty eager to get on with it. I think having a baby is the biggest sort of antimortality thing you can do.

And I was pretty reluctant at first, I have to say, because I kind of felt he was in such sort of tentative shape that I didn't want to be the one who had to take care of him and take care of the baby. But luckily, the nine months' pregnancy gave him a lot more time to recover. He was in much better shape than I had expected when the baby came. And that gave me, as we were saying before, another sort of excuse to say, Look, just get up and get on with it, because I can't do it now. I can't look after you the same way I have.

That, interestingly, is another thing that a lot of new parents go through. Essentially, the husband can't cope with the fact that the wife isn't focusing on him all the time. This is -- happens even when the husband isn't sick. So we had it double in this case.

GROSS: So it sounds in some ways you both become very different than you were, but the relationship has stayed together, despite all the changes you've gone through. I guess you've gone through those changes together.

McCRUM: No, I think we both feel that it's brought us closer together. It's given us a shared experience which, you know, is very, very important in our relationship.

GROSS: Even when you share this kind of big life experience together, you've kind of shared a book together too. Robert, it's your book, but Sarah, your journals, or excerpts of your journals, are printed in the book.

McCRUM: Well, the best bits are hers, I think.

GROSS: I guess, I'm wondering if you both -- since you're both writers, if you both used writing and the reporting on the illness and your feelings about it as a way of dealing with it.

LYALL: I have never kept a journal, really. I think when I was tiny I tried to, and it was so awful I stopped. And I really did it in this case for therapy. I felt I didn't have very many people to talk to who would really understand. I didn't want any...

GROSS: Well, you were in a new country.

LYALL: I was in a new country. I didn't have any friends yet. And I felt, I think, a lot of what is quite common in a situation, in that I didn't want to let down Robert by going around complaining to everybody what terrible shape he was in. I felt part of my role was to be a positive force and present to the outside world a pretty good picture. So that I used my journal as a way to really help myself deal with some of my scary emotions during this time.

McCRUM: In my case, I mean, all that was working properly was my right hand, my right arm. And so I'm having -- I would prop the book up on my knee in the hospital bed. And it was a way of just putting down the stuff that was going on. And it was kind of reportage, you know, this was an extraordinarily interesting thing that was happening to me, or had happened to me, and was continuing to happen.

And I wanted to make a record of it for the future, for my future. and so it wasn't so much therapeutic, as just of an account of what it was like to be in the hospital at that time. And so, as I say, it's a worm's-eye view. It's the insider's account of what stroke is like.

There are many books -- Sarah found many of them in London -- there are many books which will tell you about stroke and old age and about the physical side of stroke. There are none which will tell you what it feels like. And I wanted to say, This is what feels like.

GROSS: One last question, Robert. Do you feel that your sense of how old you are has changed? Stroke is considered, I think, an older person's illness. And you were 41 when you had your stroke. You were really young.

McCRUM: And for two or three years, I was kind of pitched forward into an old person's world, you know, walking around with a stick, I was -- or I was in a wheelchair, I couldn't do the things I used to do. I was taking everything very slowly, I was doing things with difficulty. And so, for that period, yes, I was -- I did become an older person.

Now that I am much better, much fitter again, and I'm still getting better all the time, I feel myself to be about 90 percent of the person I used to be. That's beginning to fade. On the other hand, I think that the drama of what I went through was so profound that it -- you know, I'll always look on the world through the eyes of somebody who nearly died. And that makes me an older person, by definition, I think, and...

LYALL: But the interesting thing about that too is that this sort of little curtain that separates the well people from the sick people is very, very thin. And when you're on one side, you're so afraid of the people on the other side. And I think -- I feel, certainly, having been on the other side with Robert, a real humility in the face of a lot of people who are ill, who have been ill, and I've lost that fear.

I mean, we're all going to be ill at some point, probably. And I think in the past I kind of didn't want to be around those people. I didn't want to hear about it. And now I realize it really is part of life.

GROSS: I want to thank you both very much for talking with us. Thank you.

McCRUM: Thank you.

LYALL: Thank you.

(END AUDIOTAPE)

BOGAEV: Sarah Lyall and Robert McCrum, from a 1998 interview with Terry Gross.

Robert McCrum's memoir is called "My Year Off." He's the literary editor of "The Observer" in London. Sarah Lyall often writes about British culture for "The New York Times." McCrum continues to make progress in his recovery. Last May they had their second child.

Coming up, a review of Susan Faludi's new book about men, "Stiffed."

This is FRESH AIR.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Barbara Bogaev, Philadelphia, PA; Terry Gross
Guest: Robert McCrum, Sarah Lyall
High: Robert McCrum suffered a stroke in 1995 at the young age of 42, and has written in detail about his experience and his recovery. McCrum and his wife Sarah Lyall, who was key in his recovery, discuss the experience and his memoir, "My Year Off: Recovering Life After a Stroke," now in paperback. (Rebroadcast from 10/12/98)
Spec: Health And Medicine; "My Year Off"; Robert McCrum

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: "My Year Off": Robert McCrum's Recovery From A Stroke
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: OCTOBER 08, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 100802NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: "Stiffed": A Review
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:50

BARBARA BOGAEV, HOST: So far, Susan Faludi's new book, "Stiffed," has been called everything from antifeminist to anticapitalist to "a triumph of social criticism." Our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, weighs in.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BOOK CRITIC: Susan Faludi's new book, entitled "Stiffed," is about the myths and betrayals that contemporary American society has perpetrated on men. That it's brilliant is no surprise. After all, Faludi's first book was the highly acclaimed "Backlash," an investigation of, as she called it, "America's undeclared war against women."

What's more unexpected, however, is just how exciting "Stiffed" is to read. It's packed with insights that prompt you to reconsider everything, from the Vietnam War to men's fashion magazines.

At the same time I was reading "Stiffed," I was also reading Scott Turow's new thriller, "Personal Injuries." Now, for me, a suspense story almost always wins out at day's end over a thick work of cultural criticism.

But not in this instance. The tale that unfolded in "Stiffed" was far more engrossing and revelatory. Faludi originally set out in "Stiffed" to solve the mystery of why so many men are so resistant to feminism. Well, duh, it's because lots of them feel threatened and have contempt for strong women, right?

Yeah, that's the solution many of us other feminists would have been satisfied with. But not Faludi. In an intellectually daring feat of detective work, Faludi demonstrates how feminism is pretty much a red herring, an easy target but not the cause of male baby boomers' anger.

Instead, the chief culprits are a postwar generation of emotionally absent fathers and an emergent corporate culture that prizes image over substance and regards the older male ethos of loyalty and teamwork as a chum's game.

A quick, albeit dumbed-down, way to grasp Faludi's complex reading here is to consider our current fierce nostalgia for World War I movies and books. Faludi convincingly argues that movies like "Saving Private Ryan" and best-selling popular histories by Steven Ambrose (ph) speak to a yearning baby-boomer men have for being part of something bigger than themselves, something like, say, a World War I Army platoon where other men provided support and nurturance.

A structure like that, Faludi says, fostered an older model of maternal masculinity, where being a man was about collectively doing or creating something tangible that was essential to a larger mission.

One test of a big think-book like this is whether or not the phenomenon it discusses applies for all men across the divides of race and class and sexual orientation. I'd say "Stiffed" aces that test. Faludi interviews all sorts of men, from Promisekeepers, to L.A. gangstas, to Citadel cadets, to Sly Stallone, to veterans of Stonewall and the New Left. In fact, in the revered writing tradition of the late J. Anthony Lucas, "Stiffed" is largely composed of the riveting oral testimony of these men, about their vague sense of emptiness.

In her knockout opening chapter, Faludi describes how she traveled in 1996 to southern California to investigate the closing of both the Long Beach naval shipyard and the downsizing of the nearby McDonnell-Douglas aerospace headquarters. The shipyard workers were certainly devastated by the closing, but Faludi found that they retained pride in their work up until the very last hour.

Their sense of authority, she says, was based on having authored something productive within the context of the shipyard that functioned like a community. The laid-off white collar McDonnell-Douglas men, in contrast, were like ships without rudders. Faludi says, "McDonnell-Douglas had encouraged its male workers to base their manhood on a dependency that resembled a certain type of femininity, ornamental femininity."

The company had issued them glittery titles and fancy nameplates and jewelry in the shape of jet fighters. It had all turned to tin when they found the pink slips on their desks.

I'm not sure that the college-educated men who are likely to form the bulk of Faludi's male readers are going to appreciate being told that they've fallen into a position oddly akin to that of the 1950s housewife, stripped of connections to a wider world and invited to fill the void with consumption and self-display.

But "Stiffed" is tough, politically charged stuff, not just touchy-feely psychotwaddle. I think real men and women will be able to take it.

BOGAEV: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University.

FRESH AIR's senior producer today was Roberta Shorrock. Sue Spallen (ph) directed the show. Bob Purdick is our engineer.

On Monday, we broadcast Terry's interview with Aretha Franklin. She has a new autobiography.

We'll close with her 1970 recording, "A Brand New Me."

For Terry Gross, I'm Barbara Bogaev.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Barbara Bogaev, Philadelphia, PA; Terry Gross
Guest: Maureen Corrigan
High: Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man" by Susan Faludi, a non-fiction account of the myths and betrayals American society has perpetrated on men.
Spec: Media; Susan Faludi; "Stiffed"

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: "Stiffed": A Review
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.