Mortality

At the height of his career as an essayist and public intellectual, Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with stage IV esophageal cancer. Mortality gathers the columns he wrote about the experience for Vanity Fair, along with unfinished fragments discovered after his death. Hitchens turns his skepticism on his own dying, dismantling the platitudes offered to him, examining what illness does to identity, and reckoning with the slow loss of the voice that had defined his working life. He writes about the etiquette of being a cancer patient, the false promises of positive thinking, and the strange citizenship of what he calls the land of the sick. The book is brief and unfinished by design, ending mid-thought, which gives it a raw honesty about the way a life can simply stop.