Jean-Dominique Bauby
author profile
born
April 23, 1952
died
March 09, 1997
gender
male
place of birth
France
about this author
Jean-Dominique Bauby was a well-known French journalist and author and editor of the French fashion magazine, ELLE.
On December 8, 1995 at the age of 43, Bauby suffered a massive stroke. When he woke up twenty days later, he found he was entirely speechless; he could only blink his left eyelid. This rare condition is called Locked-in Syndrome, a condition wherein the mental faculties are intact but the entire body is paralyzed. Bauby also lost 60 pounds in the first 20 weeks after his stroke.
Despite his condition, he wrote the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by blinking when the correct letter was reached by a person slowly reciting the alphabet over and over again. Bauby had to compose and edit the book entirely in his he...more
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avg rating: 3.99
| 6,080 ratings
| 1,375 reviews
| 2 distinct works
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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby avg rating 4.00 — 5,642 ratings — published 1997 36 editions |
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Raoul Lévy: Un aventurier du cinéma by Jean-Dominique Bauby avg rating 0.0 — 0 ratings — published 1995 |
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"The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner."
— Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
— Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
"Want to play hangman? asks Theophile, and I ache to tell him that I have enough on my plate playing quadriplegic. But my communication system disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter. So the rule is to avoid impulsive sallies. It deprives conversation of its sparkle, all those gems you bat back and forth like a ball-and I count this forced lack of humor one of the great drawbacks of my condition."
— Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
— Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
"Once, I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories."
— Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
— Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
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