The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Jean-Dominique Bauby 1997

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
death memoir literary fiction survival

Our Take

Bauby wrote this entire memoir by blinking his left eyelid. Locked-in syndrome reduced his world to a single movement, and he used it to compose something luminous. Each sentence cost him thousands of blinks. The beauty is excruciating because you know the effort behind every word.

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