The Body in the Library: Memoir of a diagnosis Author : Graham Caveney ISBN-13 : 9781913512507 Publisher : Peninsula Press Guideline Price : £15.99 Graham Caveney started out as a writer for NME, The Face and GQ in the 1980s and 1990s. He has written biographies of William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and a book on New York’s alternative literary scene.
Essentially an interpreter of music and the arts, he’s also proudly working class and a man with a tumultuous life story. His previous memoirs, The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness (2018) and On Agoraphobia (2022) explore addiction, sexual abuse and mental illness. The Body in the Library is also autobiographical.
Caveney was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer in early 2022, and he chronicles his illness from diagnosis until an unexpected remission that sees him through to beyond his “sell-by date”, allowing him to finish his book. If it sounds grim, of course it is. Yet Caveney’s tough honesty, humour and dignity allow us to read his story with compassion and deep respect as opposed to horror.
He is raw, but never self-indulgent, moving and yet never maudlin: “I find I am using the past tense more. Is dissolving into was.” He is angry; there are no Hallmark card epiphanies.
But the gravity with which he approaches his subject is shot through with a resplendent lust for life that bubbles into absurdist humour at unexpected moments, such as when, in view of his 14-month survival estimate, he considers as.