What Illness Can Teach Us About Uncertainty - Jonathan Gluck on his new memoir about cancer and coming to terms with not knowing

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In his new memoir, An Exercise In Uncertainty, journalist and editor Jonathan Gluck chronicles more than 20 years of living with multiple myeloma, an incurable but treatable cancer. He joined me to talk about how he’s coped with illness, why he chose this moment to write about it, and, most importantly, how he’s learned to deal with a condition all of us face to one degree or another: uncertainty.

Jon explains the concept of “predemption”—a mindset that’s helped him find something positive, even in the toughest moments—and describes the invisible aspects of cancer, how it affected family dynamics, and the honest conversations he’s had with his kids about his condition. He reflects on the strain illness can have on relationships, especially marriage, and how fly fishing became a crucial form of therapy and connection.

GUEST BIO

Jonathan Gluck is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. He was deputy editor of New York magazine for ten years, after which he worked as managing editor of Vogue. His work has been recognized with multiple National Magazine Awards.

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HOUSEKEEPING

📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.

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Stuff to read and listen to:

New York Times, Jan 31, 2025: The L.A. Fires Taught Me To Accept Help

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✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi there. This is just a quick note to tell you about an incredibly exciting event that's coming up this October 11th and 12th in New York City. It's an unspeak-easy retreat on steroids. It is not only co-ed, since you guys have been asking for it. It is going to be bigger than our usual retreats with more speakers and more participants.
0:23.3	The lineup of speakers is still in the works. We're still adding more. But at the moment,
0:27.8	it includes, are you ready? So many friends of the podcast, John McWhorter, Carol Hoeven,
0:34.6	Mike Pesca, Peter Moskos, Alana Newhouse, Andrew Hartz, Ben Appel, and Lisa Sullen Davis,
0:41.7	just to name a few. The way it's going to work is that the speakers will do panels or be interviewed,
0:48.3	sometimes by me, sometimes by others, and pretty quickly those panels will open up to include the attendees and it will turn into a
0:57.0	larger discussion, not just an audience Q&A, but a real conversation where you can interact with
1:03.0	your intellectual heroes. Again, this is happening October 11th and 12th in New York City. It'll go
1:09.5	from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. Lunch is included.
1:14.6	As with all unspeak easy retreats, it is off the record. No social media. We're going to sit down.
1:20.5	We're going to concentrate. We're going to spend an amazing two days together. Spaces are limited.
1:25.5	So go to the unspeak easy.com slash retreats to find out how to sign up.
1:32.3	Hope to see you there. People would rather get the bad news than have to keep waiting. That's how
1:38.4	much we hate uncertainty as a species and as humans. And they did experiments where people said they'd rather go ahead and get an electrical shock
1:47.9	than keep sitting there and waiting and wondering if they were or weren't going to get it.
1:52.8	Many people are just like, just go ahead and give it to me and let's get it over with.
1:55.5	So it's really interesting.
1:57.1	I mean, how much we hate uncertainty.
2:03.2	Welcome to the Unpeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. In 2003, my guest, Jonathan Gluck,
2:10.1	was 38 years old and happily married with a good career and a seven-month-old daughter.
2:15.2	It was also the year he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma,
2:18.9	a relatively rare cancer that affects the blood system and bone marrow. The cancer was incurable,
	...

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