Six years ago, British author Julian Barnes was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer. But rather than feel angry or fearful, Barnes experienced a strange calm; he approached the disease with what he calls his "novelist's interest."
"I love talking to doctors and consultants and nurses. They stick their needles into your arm and take off pints of blood," he says. "It's very interesting. Though like many things, it does get a bit tedious on the 34th time of taking a pound of blood out of you."
Cancer means that Barnes, who turns 80 on Jan. 19, will spend the rest of his life on chemotherapy drugs. Still, he says, he doesn't grieve for his aging and ailing body.
"We are these creatures who come into this earth unbidden, not consulted, and we live a certain amount of time — much longer than our ancestors," he says. "But because we live longer, our body begins to break down and the medical costs increase."
Barnes' new book, Departure(s), will publish the day after his birthday. Part memoir, part fiction, the book chronicles Barnes' cancer diagnosis and his reflections on death. In a way, Departure(s) is a companion to his 2013 book, Levels of Life, which detailed the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh, who was also his literary agent. (Kavanagh died in 2008, just weeks after being diagnosed with a rare, hyper-aggressive brain tumor.)
Despite his frequent meditations on death, Barnes says he is "alive and enjoying myself." He remarried in August, and is looking forward to his birthday and the publication of his book, which he says will be his last.
"It's been a very strange five months up to now," he says. "I can't remember a period of months when there's been so much going on."
Interview highlights
On his "hybrid" books
I often write hybrid books, and Departure(s) is a hybrid. It's not a term that publishers like. They like to have something that says "fiction" or "nonfiction." … Quite a few of [my books] are actually hybrid, which mix autobiography, fiction, nonfiction, art criticism, whatever is relevant to my thinking about the book.
I've always been quite relaxed about this, but I know that it does annoy some people, and indeed, the character Julian Barnes is attacked at one point by one of the participants in this love affair, who he hasn't met for 40 years or so. And she says, "I don't like this hybrid stuff you do. I think you should stick to one thing or another." And it was rather enjoyable to have a character rebuking me for the book that I was writing. I sort of enjoyed that. And I get cross with her and I say, "Well, you may like or not like one of my books, but I want you to know that I know exactly what I'm doing when I'm writing."
On thinking about death on a daily basis
I was talking to a friend of mine who said, "Oh, I don't think about death. I'm only 60, I'll think about when it's nearer the time." And you think, well, death doesn't quite necessarily operate in that fashion. Death could be an out-of-control motorbike coming around a corner and taking you out. You won't have had much time to think in those three seconds before it hits you. One of my French gurus is the 17th-century philosopher Montaigne, and he said we should think about death on a daily basis. We should make it our familiar. That's the best way of treating it. Not as some awful sort of ghastly skeleton with a scythe in its hand coming to chop us off. He says we should ... almost domesticate it, tame it in this way, and then we should hope to die while planting out our cabbages. That's a wonderfully sort of wise approach to it all. I haven't got a vegetable garden anymore. I used to have one, and when I planted cabbages they didn't do very well. That's the only fault I can find with Montaigne's view of death.
On how he expects his wife's death will inform his own
You could say that she showed me how to die with grace and also with a consideration for other people who were coming to see her.Julian Barnes on the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh
She had a catastrophic diagnosis and was dead in 37 days. It was like being taken downhill in an avalanche and every day something got worse. It was, by a long way, the most appalling thing that's just happened to me in my life, and the most blackest. The thing that most deprived you of sort of hope and balance really. It took me years to get over it, but I don't think I shall mourn my own departure in quite the same way. …
You could say that she showed me how to die with grace and also with a consideration for other people who were coming to see her. She never got cross. She never became tragic or upset. So in some ways we were well-suited because I have that sort of temperament as well.
On experiencing suicidal thoughts
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
I remember very clearly when I thought that I might kill myself. It was a few weeks after my wife had died and I was walking home and I looked across at the curb on the other side of the road ... and I thought, of course you can kill yourself, that's permissible, it's not unforgivable in my morality. I'm extremely unhappy. I'm bereft. I'm lost, though I have many friends. I think I said, or a friend said to me — I can't remember which way around it was — "Give it two years." I said, "OK, I'll give it to two years."
But before that two-year period had elapsed, I discovered the reason why I couldn't kill myself: I wasn't allowed to kill myself, and that's because I was the best rememberer of my wife. I knew her and I had celebrated her, in all her forms and in all of her nature. And I had loved her deeply. And I realized that if I killed myself, then I would in a way be killing her, too. I'd be killing the best memories of her. They would disappear from the world. And I just wouldn't allow myself to do that. And at that point it just turned on its head and I knew I would have to live.
On his support of assisted dying
I think if I'm in extreme pain, with no chance of a cure for whatever illness I have, and I think if I'm getting no pleasure out of life, and as I see it, people are not getting any pleasure out me and my existence, then I have the perfect human right to end my own life. I don't want to go to some industrial estate in Switzerland to do it, that sounds pretty grim. That's why I'm a great believer and supporter of assisted dying in the U.K.
On the fallibility of memory
I used to believe — as I think most people do when they're young — that memory was somehow something rather stable, that it was like you had something happen to you and you wanted to remember it, and so you took it along to one of those storage units which are along the sides of lots of main roads and outside city centers, and you deposited it there. And then when you needed that memory, you went there, you opened the box, you took it out, and there it was, as pure and as truthful as when you put it in. I went along with this sort of view of memory for quite a long time until I realized that actually memory deteriorates like everything else. And that, in fact, the more times you tell a story, the more times you subtly alter it, the more time you make yourself come out of it a little better, or you add a joke, and so on and so forth. So you could say that your best memories, the ones you're fondest of, are your least reliable memories.
Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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