Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads: He Wanted to Die Holding Hands
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4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2022
⏱️ 18 minutes
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Summary
David Plotz talks with author Amy Bloom about her journey to support the death, by suicide, of her husband, chronicled in her new book In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for April 2022. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm David Plotz of CityCast. I'm here in Washington, D.C. In Love by Amy Bloom recounts |
| 0:17.0 | the death by suicide of Amy's husband, Brian Amici, following his diagnosis with |
| 0:22.1 | Alzheimer's disease. The book is a detailed account, very detailed account of how Amy and Brian |
| 0:28.1 | struggled to find a way for him to take his own life and finally located the one place in the |
| 0:34.1 | world that would help them, which is a Swiss organization called Dignitas. It sounds grib. It is not. In Love is a, it's a beautiful book. It's a sad book. It's also a really funny and delightful book, which I hope we will convey today. And truly, I tore through In Love, not just for personal reasons that I'll get into, but because it's paced kind of like a thriller, |
| 0:54.7 | but also reads like a comedy, and it has an enormous heart. So Amy Bloom, I'm so happy to be |
| 1:00.4 | joined by you from Connecticut. Welcome to Gavis Reeds. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. |
| 1:05.0 | And before I get to in love, I want to remind our listeners that Amy is also a spectacular |
| 1:09.9 | writer in all kinds of forms in essay, |
| 1:12.2 | in novel and short stories. We've talked, both Emily Bazelon and I have talked on the GabFest |
| 1:16.8 | about Away, her novel, which is one of our very favorite books, both Emily and mine, |
| 1:22.7 | a very different flavor than this. So, Amy, who was Brian Amici? Why did you marry him? |
| 1:29.7 | Oh, well, he was a hard man to stop, and he certainly wanted to get married. |
| 1:36.0 | When he played football at Yale, his nickname, as he would have been happy to tell you, was Thor. |
| 1:42.6 | And that gives you some sense of what he was like. |
| 1:46.3 | He was just a big presence. He was a big dog, big heart, big laugh, big appreciation of the |
| 1:54.7 | world, big appreciation in some ways of himself, of the opportunity to be who he was. And I fell in love with all of that. This was |
| 2:04.5 | the kind of man who was not offended if you pointed out his faults. He knew what his faults |
| 2:10.6 | were and he was okay with them and he certainly hoped you were okay with them too. |
| 2:15.1 | He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. How did that happen? When did that |
| 2:19.5 | happen? In the early summer of 2019, and it seemed to me, and it also seemed to his neurologist, |
... |
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