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Lucky Man: A Memoir, in detail
Michael J. Fox's memoir of his early career and his experience of being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at thirty years old — an age at which the disease is exceedingly rare — is one of the more honest celebrity memoirs in the genre. Fox begins with the morning in 1991 when he woke to find his left pinkie finger trembling uncontrollably, a symptom that would eventually be diagnosed as early-onset Parkinson's, and works backward to his childhood in Canada and the television success of Family Ties and the Back to the Future trilogy, before returning to the decade of concealment and the eventual public disclosure.
Fox kept his diagnosis secret for seven years, managing his symptoms with medication while continuing to act, marry, and have children. The memoir documents this period with considerable self-awareness about the contradictions: he was simultaneously doing some of his best work and drinking to manage anxiety about the disease's progression. He acknowledges a substantial alcohol problem during the concealment years and credits his wife Tracy Pollan with insisting on treatment. The honesty about alcohol dependency is what separates Lucky Man from more sanitized celebrity memoirs.
The disclosure — Fox went public with his diagnosis in 1998 — transformed his identity from action-star-in-decline into something quite different: a celebrity advocate whose personal situation gave him unusual credibility and political access on the issue of stem cell research and Parkinson's funding. Fox describes this transformation with mixed feelings. He gained a mission and a platform; he also lost the ability to pretend he was something he was not.
The title's apparent paradox is the memoir's actual argument. Fox insists that Parkinson's disease was, in some specific and non-sentimental way, good for him — that it stripped away the narcissistic self-absorption that had characterized his early career and replaced it with genuine priorities: his wife, his children, his work on behalf of the Parkinson's community. Whether the reader finds this convincing depends partly on how much weight they give to the decade of concealment and the drinking that preceded the acceptance.
The big ideas
- 1.
Concealment of chronic illness has costs that compound. Fox's seven years of hiding his diagnosis required escalating deceptions and contributed to his alcohol dependency.
- 2.
Early-onset Parkinson's is a different disease experience from the late-onset version that most people associate with the condition. Fox was thirty, at the height of his career, with young children.
- 3.
Acceptance is not resignation. The memoir distinguishes between giving up and deciding to live fully within one's actual circumstances — a distinction Fox explores with more nuance than most illness memoirs.
