A memoir of a 51 year old man who is diagnose with a malignant tumor on his spine. The surgeon is unable to remove all but 10%- so he goes through a summer of radiation to his spine. Walking by the end of radiation is impossible and he succumbs to the wheelchair. He describes his 10 years since the surgery and the intolerable pain he is in. As a single person, he has to rely on friends and students for help. After suffering for 2 years he discovers great help with biofeedback and meditation. Throughout the book he speaks of his writing as a refuge. And poetry. I enjoyed this book and his style of writing. You can tell he is well educated. (He was written numerous books and teaches English at Duke University),

I remember being moved by this story of the author's battle with severe illness and recovery. Price leads his readers through all of the physical and emotional upheaval that his illness caused as it advanced. In slightly more than a year, longer than his doctors had anticipated, he was irreversibly a paraplegic. Future surgeries left Price in such unimaginable pain that he resorted to biofeedback and hypnosis to help control it. His attempt to regain some of his former life are courageous.
However, the most important memory I have of the book is that in the reading it I began to question the difference between truth and fiction. I wondered how true the memories of the author were really in baring the changes in his life. ( )

Reynolds Price died just ten days ago, a sad occasion that prompted me to finally pick up and read his 1994 memoir, A WHOLE NEW LIFE. I'd been a Price reader since my college days when, in 1969, I read his first novel, A Long and Happy Life. Since then I'd read The Surface of Earth and a couple of his other exquisitely introspective southern novels. So reading this memoir about his pain-filled and courageous struggle with spinal cancer in the mid-80s was something of an eye-opener for me. I hadn't known about his cancer. The style, given its grim subject, is much more direct and starkly stated than other Price books I'd read. Even so, he does manage to wax philosophic here and there about his years-long ordeal with excruciating pain following multiple surgeries and massive doses of radiation therapy, all attempts to rid him of a long tumor wrapped within his spinal cord - an evil invasive presence he learned to call "the eel." He was left a paraplegic with useless legs and little feeling in his body from the chest down and endured years of pharmaceutical cocktails, largely useless attempts to quell his chronic pain. Finally through the methods of hypnosis and biofeedback he learned to live with the pain, which never really left him.

The descriptions of the diagnosis, surgeries and subsequent treatment are necessarily grim, but Price also makes clear his gratitude to many of his doctors, nurses and other caregivers and close friends. One aspect of his sickness and struggles to recover which I found especially interesting and poignant was the way in which the community of writers rallied around Price with letters, calls and visits. Many of them were not even especially close friends, but people who had met him at various events and respected his body of work.

"... far from demonstrating the rivalry and backbiting of which we're often accused - fellow writers helped me especially with phone calls and letters. A stranger to Philip Roth, for instance, approached him in Central Park that July of '84, said 'Reynolds Price has spinal cancer'; and Philip was on the phone to me at once."

Other writers who wrote or called included John Updike, Frederick Busch, Stephen Spender, William Styron, Anne Tyler, Thomas McGuane, Toni Morrison, and Eudora Welty. He even heard from opera singer, Leontyne Price. Indeed, were Price still with us, I too would write him 'posthaste,' as did Updike.

There are poems interspersed throughout the book, as well as a short selection of poetry at the end of the narrative - all pieces Price wrote during his illness.

In sum, A Whole New Life is perhaps one of the most eloquent and understated records of a grave and painful illness you will ever find. My admirations for Price has increased a hundredfold since reading it; now I want to read his other memoir, CLEAR PICTURES, and perhaps will also seek out his novel, THE TONGUES OF ANGELS. Price taught for over 50 YEARS at Duke. He was 77 when he died on January 20, 2011. ( )

This is an achingly painful memoir of North Carolina writer Reynolds Price's life and death/health and wholeness issues between 1984 and 1994. From a dragging foot to finding a 10 inch long malignant tumor intertwined in his spinal cord, through radiation, excrutiating pain, paralysis, paraplegia and upwards to hope, renewed faith, and increasing professional output and creative success, Price minces no words, leaves no emotions or reactions uncovered, and reaches and shares some remarkable conclusions. The title, A Whole New Life is wonderfully apt and the subtitle, An Illness and a Healing, traces a remarkable recovery of a surprising sort. ( )

Chronicles Price's diagnosis with cancer and eventual recovery.