Codeine Diary: A Memoir - Hardcover

by Tom Andrews (Author)

This memoir of hemophilia is intensely personal and impressionistic, shifting back and forth in time between the author's recovery from a bleed episode in 1989 and accounts of his childhood. Among the issues he deals with are his guilt for having survived both his brother, who died of kidney disease in 1980, and the nine out of ten hemophiliaces who've been stricken by HIV and AIDS. The author is an award-winning poet, and his prose here is lyrical and highly original, approaching issues of illness and family in fresh and deeply affecting ways. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Back Jacket

In Codeine Diary, award-winning poet Tom Andrews gives a riveting and often hilarious account of living fully under the shadow of hemophilia. Codeine Diary is a lyrical and haunting memoir of one man's refusal to succumb to the constraints of his disease. Andrews learned early that ordinary life is a perpetual, fragile miracle, which drove him to race motorcycles and play in a punk band as a teenager - pursuits most hemophiliacs would regard as foolhardy at best. But while Andrews was "a poster child for bad insurance risks", he was considered the healthy one in his family: his brother suffered from a devastating and ultimately fatal kidney disorder. In fact, the two diseases were eerily symmetrical: there were days when Andrews would suffer a bleed while his brother's blood would not stop coagulating. Having acquired hemophilia through a "spontaneous mutation" and not hereditarily, having avoided HIV, which nine out of ten severe hemophiliacs contracted in the early 1980s, Andrews is living proof of the strange role chance plays in our lives.