Just Writing This Is Killing Me, Tales of Love and the Lockdown That Lasted Seventeen Years (forthcoming from Regal House Publishing, November 2027), encompasses nearly two decades of life with a terminal disease advancing with all deliberate speed, followed by the double lung transplant that sweeps away the grim diagnosis. It’s a story about living, not dying, about history, both public and private, and about love--affection, obsession, elation, infatuation, filial, familial, erotic, platonic. It moves from the Colorado Rockies to the Republic of Georgia, from Montreal to Manhattan, from New Hampshire to Namibia, from the United Nations to the National Institutes of Health.

This is a story in which birds fall from the sky; innocents are slaughtered; an empire founders; and women are cuckolded—although in one case it may have happened only in the racy and unreliable memory of her nonagenarian husband. 

In Quebec, a doctor about to administer an injection declares in French, “I’m no good with needles!” assuming incorrectly that the patient spread out before her doesn’t understand; years later, that same patient declaims Russian poetry just before she’s wheeled into surgery; a beloved pulmonologist grieves his inability to heal his own father’s lung disease.

Marbled with poetry, travelogue, and reflections on the necessity and the impossibility of translation, Just Writing This Is Killing Me unfolds at the intersection of high-stakes geopolitics and intimate personal confession. 

Is it memoir, fiction, or essay? 

Yes. 

All of it is true, and some of it really happened.