LIFE ITSELF: A MEMOIRBY ROGER EBERT
Magnificent!!!! Stupendous!!! Outstanding!!! Bravo!!!
On the first day of December 2011, in the early morning hours before getting myself ready for another’s day work, I finally completed reading Life Itself, the exemplary memoir from the great Roger Ebert. The first word I said to myself after I read the final page and closed the cover was “beautiful” because in my mind, this book is a thing of beauty.
I should inform you that typically, I tend to not read biographies or autobiographies that much. When I do, they are also typically about a treasured musician, writer or filmmaker and many times, I tend to not even read them within a linear fashion. I tend to jump around a lot, going backwards and forwards, and finding the sections that go behind the scenes of any particular work that I have long admired.
I like to see myself as a voracious reader but I am admittedly a slow reader. Unlike my wife, who consistently chomps through one book after another with Herculean velocity (she often reminds me of those old Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics commercials with fingers flying across the book’s pages), that I tease her about any possibly reading comprehension she may or may not possess. I am the type of person who can easily read a book for a short period, place it down, return to it later and so on. On rare occasions, I am so riveted by what I am reading that I cannot place the book down. But there are the times during which I am so enraptured that I want the experience to last me for as long as possible. I wish to savor it for I love it so much that I do not wish for the sensation the book is bestowing upon me to end anytime soon. I think of whenever John Irving releases a new novel or when author David Michaelis released his mammoth 704-page tome of Charles M. Schulz’s life and career, entitled Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography in 2007. For those titles, I sat and read the books completely enthralled as those authors’ gifts with the written word captivated me tremendously. Roger Ebert’s Life Itself is precisely one of those kinds of books.
I am not certain if I could honestly say that Life Itself exceeded any conceivable expectations I may have had for it because I just as honestly had no idea of what to expect. Roger Ebert’s writings as a film critic have deeply inspired me, as all of you know so very well. His life and career will always be a primary source of inspiration for any word that appears upon Savage Cinema, for his work has enriched my life in ways that he will never fully know. With his memoir, we are all now given the opportunity to take a gaze into the fullness of his life, which he presents with a writing style so personable and luxurious that the experience of reading Life Itself felt at times to be as grand as any John Irving novel and as open and forthcoming as if Ebert himself were sitting in the room with you, recounting tales from his remarkable life journey. For this book, I wanted to sit within his world for as long as I could stretch out the experience. Yes, of course, I could read it again. But, I could never read it again for the first time and as we all know, there’s something so special about that first time.
Life Itself opens with a stunning prologue entitled “Memory,” a near tour de force that begins with the magical line, “I was born inside the movie of my life.” It is rare that a book’s opening words grip me so instantly as well as feeling both epic and intimate. From this point, and through the following 55 crisply written, easily digestible and exuberantly engaging chapters, Roger Ebert presents us with a cavalcade of experiences. From his idyllic childhood growing up in Urbana, Il to his beginnings as a journalist and life as a film critic to his world travels, bout with alcoholism, romances and of course his relationship with the late, great Gene Siskel, Ebert shares his loves, passions, tributes, and personal philosophies with wit, warmth and frank openness.
By the time the book nears its conclusion, Ebert arrives in the present, speaking directly about his ailments, most notably the cancer that has inflicted him and the subsequent surgeries that have left him unable to eat, drink or speak. Despite a physical state that I could never imagine for myself and feverishly wish never occurs to me or to anyone close to me, Ebert seems somewhat bemused by the current state of his existence. While he strikes me as being too pragmatic to even accept the term, he reaches a point of true inspiration as he has decided to not wallow within any tragic misfortunes and to approach this life stage as an opportunistic one. Roger Ebert, more than ever, is able to fully engage in the life of the mind, a mind which contains a lifetime of memories of which he is willing to unspool for our reading pleasure.
Roger Ebert’s Life Itself, is not a book about movies, although movies do figure into the life narrative of this figure through chapters devoted to his experiences with Lee Marvin, John Wayne, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen among others. Ebert’s book, in its entirety, is as absorbing as the very best novels I have ever read. I was so in love with the experience of reading it, I purposefully prolonged it by slowing my reading pace even more. This book was not something I wanted to just consume or hurry myself through as I found the experience to be so fulfilling and rewarding.
What I truly loved about Life Itself, beyond Ebert’s candor, was how Ebert essentially utilized a similar tactic Martin Scorsese used with his excellent documentary “George Harrison: Living In the Material World.” The book, like that film, is more conversational as well as more anecdotal. While the book does indeed possess a structured narrative that starts at the beginnings of Ebert’s life and follows through to the present, Ebert allows himself the luxury to allow people, places and events of the past to merge with the people, places and events of the present. If he mentions a person without explanation of who that person may be, never fear for you will eventually be fully informed. Ultimately, this gratifying approach gives you a wonderful and extremely literate approximation of what it is and what it means to live a life. Roger Ebert’s Life Itself is a book about memories, vivid, sumptuously described memories designed for us to lose ourselves inside of as well as to reunite us with our own memories and life journey. Like everything he and Gene Siskel accomplished upon their decidedly populist television show, every word of this book is part of a conversation between author and reader and what a rich conversation Life Itself provides for all parties who wish to be included.
I have to say that when I first heard about the publication of Mr. Ebert’s memories, I was initially anxious to see what I could gather about his relationship with Gene Siskel. Perhaps I felt that I would most likely commit myself to jumping around the book’s structure and narrative, cherry picking moments and experiences as I tend to do for books of this nature. Yet, as previously stated, from the first words of the book in the prologue, I was transported and captivated all the way to the book’s conclusion. This achievement was due to the simple fact that I was supremely engaged with the author’s voice, a voice that combined the conversational and the literate so effortlessly and brilliantly.
As terrific, informative and insightful as the sections concerning Gene Siskel are, surprisingly these sections were not even my favorite parts of the book. When he described his earliest experiences with journalism as a reporter covering sports for Urbana High School and later as a writer and news editor for The Daily Illini at Champaign Urbana, I indeed felt a bit of a kinship as I remembered my first tastes of writing, editing and journalism when I wrote and edited for my high school newspaper. My heart and Anglophile spirit soared to the stratosphere during the sections where Ebert spoke so lovingly of his annual travels to London and the beloved sights of his treasured English neighborhood at 22 Jermyn Street, so much so that these sections inspired me to voyage across the pond more than ever.
Most of all, it was when Ebert becomes even more personal, allowing us to gaze through the window into his life where I found Life Itself to function at its most gripping. To paraphrase Mr. Ebert, he explains that since he is only planning to write his memoirs one time, he might as well lay everything bare and I deeply appreciated and savored his frankness. I was amazed with how much he was willing to delve into publicly and reveal about his politics, spiritual beliefs as well as the dark struggles he faced during his years as an alcoholic and the subsequent struggles with his Mother, who also fell into alcoholism later during her life. Certainly his descriptions of his battles with cancer, failed surgeries and current struggles are also all detailed with candidness and strikingly without any sense of self-pity. Additionally, it is when he explores his personal love story between himself and Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert, his wife of almost 20 years, where Life Itself contains some of the book’s most gorgeously written passages. I especially found the three final sections which close the book, (entitled “My Last Words,” “How I Believe In God,” and “Go Gently” respectively) to be the most sobering and soulful as Ebert again merges the epic and the intimate, the personal and the universal, as he ponders his mortality.
Dear readers, I cannot recommend Life Itself highly enough for absolutely every single one of you. You do not have to be a fan of movies or of Roger Ebert to find something to enjoy. I recommend this book to absolutely anyone who just loves the act of reading and losing themselves in the art of fine writing because the reading of this book was a complete joy and Roger Ebert’s writing is exquisitely fine indeed. I recommend this book because not only is this book about Ebert’s life, it is a book about all of our lives. It is a book about how we choose to live and how our memories inform, shape, and guide us through every step of our life’s journeys.
Life Itself, while firmly about Roger Ebert, is also a book about us! What a blessing it is that he has shared his wonderful life with us so thrillingly and what a blessing it is that this book provides yet another vehicle for us to explore ourselves so wondrously.
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