Hey, it's NPR's book at the day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The journalist Frank Broody just wrote this book titled The Beauty of Dusk.

It's part memoir about living after his body betrays him in a way that changes him permanently, and part reporterpiece, where he's talking to all sorts of people who've gone through some really, really hard things. And one of the hypotheses he poses in this interview with NPR's R.A. Shapiro

is that we all suffer from an excess of politeness. And he doesn't say this from a reactionary

political perspective. Instead, it comes from the idea that we feel squeamish asking people about some of their deepest and most personal pains.

But ultimately, for the most part, he says people are glad to talk about them.

And it's good for everyone.

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Frank Bruny's professional life had been a series of wins. He's held titles at the New York

Times from White House correspondent to chief restaurant critic to opinion columnist. Then in 2017,

he had an unexpected medical calamity. When he woke up one morning, his eyesight was strange.

The right side of my field of vision had a sort of dappled fog over it, and then it just didn't

go away, and it didn't go away hour after hour, and I realized something was very wrong. He'd had a sort of

stroke. Doctors told him it was likely irreversible and his vision could get worse.

Rather than write a book focused on his medical odyssey, Frank Bruny's new memoir, The Beauty of Dusk, introduces readers to many different people who share something in common.

Everyone in the book, whether the person is someone whom I knew for a long time and had

never really kind of talked to in the way I began to, or whether it was someone I met and

questioned in a way I wouldn't have before, everyone had been dealt some sort of hardship

challenge or setback well before old age, but in a way that sort of augured old age. And had gone through that

with grace, had adapted, and had so much to teach me, had so much to teach anybody, but has never

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