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Chris Adrian: “kind of like Sesame Street”
Perspectives
“I live in Brooklyn, New York, in a neighbourhood called Clinton Hill”, writer and paediatric oncologist Chris Adrian tells me. “It’s kind of like Sesame Street, with a little more garbage scattered around, a little fewer giant birds wandering about.” It’s a typically whimsical statement, redolent of the surrealism of his novels and short stories. I’m interested in finding out more about how Adrian’s work, life, and art relate to one another. Was he from a medical family? “I grew up in Maryland and Florida”, he tells me. “My mother was a flight attendant-turnedhomemaker, and my father was an airline pilot...I have a sister who’s a veterinarian and an uncle who was an ophthalmologist, but that’s it for other medical types in the family. My mother got it in her head very early in my life that I ought to be a doctor, so I was strongly encouraged in that direction, though it never felt like someone was making me try to pursue something I didn’t already feel a deep affinity for.” Doctors who write aren’t uncommon, but those who find time to pursue both careers successfully are pretty rare. Adrian’s literary career began before medical school, with stories published in The Paris Review and Story. “I started writing in high school, and fell into the hands of an extraordinary writing teacher in college, who encouraged me to go to a graduate writing programme and pointed out that it would be easier to do before medical school than afterwards. I don’t think there was a point where I decided to do both, though there have been many times when I worried that I was going to have to choose one or the other.” The attempt to juggle medicine and writing turned out to be serendipitous: after being disappointed by a taster period in psychiatry (“I discovered that years of trying to talk my mother out of vodka-soaked depressions did not guarantee an aptitude or passion for the actual work of actually helping people with mental illnesses”), he found his chosen specialty at precisely the right moment. “My medical school was kind enough to give me 6 weeks off to finish my first novel [Gob’s Grief], though they asked me to pay the time back out of elective time in my fourth year, so my paediatrics rotation got moved to the beginning of my fourth year. I had given up by then on finding a specialty, and was despairing a bit. So it was a really pleasant surprise...the medicine had a lot of attraction for me—it was like getting to be a generalist and a specialist at the same time—as did the people who practised it—they all seemed happy and they all seemed to like each other, which was clearly not always the case among the other specialties.” In Adrian’s second novel, The Children’s Hospital, a hospital is left bobbing on a 7-mile-deep ocean after www.thelancet.com Vol 381 February 2, 2013
an apocalyptic flood. It’s interesting that Adrian chose somewhere representative of his day-to-day work as a refuge for the survivors of global disaster, rather than, say, the island of Lord of the Flies, or for that matter the department store of Dawn of the Dead. Writer Katy Darby, who has directed a staged reading of Grand Rounds, one of Adrian’s short stories, highlights “the intersection of the personal and the professional, and his subtle understanding of the way life bleeds into work and vice versa” as strengths of his writing. What does Adrian feel about this “intersection”? “I suppose that as a trainee, which I’ve been while doing most of my writing, it felt like there was nothing else to write about, or that it would be somehow disingenuous to write about anything else...I tried hard to write about something else, and almost always failed. But it started to seem obvious eventually that, for me, writing about medicine was in fact writing about everything else, both because the hospital world could and did contain the whole world, and because under the cover of a hospital story my imagination could engage with absolutely any problem or obsession.” We end by discussing the issue of religion and medicine. The two used to go hand-in-hand, but now often find themselves in conflict—and the situation in the USA appears, to outsiders at least, to be increasingly polarised and bitter. Adrian is, in another twist to his career that would seem remarkable to outsiders but completely logical to those who know him, enrolled at Harvard Divinity School. What’s his take on religion versus medicine? “I think they belong at loggerheads, and I say that both as a perpetually lapsing atheist and as a chaplain-in-training. I do believe that good pastoral care and good medicine can have some things in common, and that the habits of reflection fostered in divinity training could be as useful, in some ways, to physicians as the habits of critical thinking we all learn in training.” He adds, however, that “ministers and physicians represent two vastly different and unbridgeable types of authority and enterprise that I think are in conflict for good reasons, and I think that this conflict should always only be arbitrated or resolved in the hearts of individuals, not in the policies of departments or institutions or organisations”. Adrian’s world is one full of brilliantly managed contradictions—of fantasy and reality, of science and art. I suspect his interior world is a lot like Sesame Street, too. Only with less garbage, and more giant birds.
Gus Eliot
Profile Chris Adrian: “kind of like Sesame Street”
Further reading Gob’s Grief. New York: Broadway Books, 2001 The Children’s Hospital. New York: Grove Press, 2006 A Better Angel: Stories. New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2008 The Great Night. New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2011 Grand Rounds. Granta 120: Medicine. London: Granta, 2012
Niall Boyce [email protected]
365
“I live in Brooklyn, New York, in a neighbourhood called Clinton Hill”, writer and paediatric oncologist Chris Adrian tells me. “It’s kind of like Sesame Street, with a little more garbage scattered around, a little fewer giant birds wandering about.” It’s a typically whimsical statement, redolent of the surrealism of his novels and short stories. I’m interested in finding out more about how Adrian’s work, life, and art relate to one another. Was he from a medical family? “I grew up in Maryland and Florida”, he tells me. “My mother was a flight attendant-turnedhomemaker, and my father was an airline pilot...I have a sister who’s a veterinarian and an uncle who was an ophthalmologist, but that’s it for other medical types in the family. My mother got it in her head very early in my life that I ought to be a doctor, so I was strongly encouraged in that direction, though it never felt like someone was making me try to pursue something I didn’t already feel a deep affinity for.” Doctors who write aren’t uncommon, but those who find time to pursue both careers successfully are pretty rare. Adrian’s literary career began before medical school, with stories published in The Paris Review and Story. “I started writing in high school, and fell into the hands of an extraordinary writing teacher in college, who encouraged me to go to a graduate writing programme and pointed out that it would be easier to do before medical school than afterwards. I don’t think there was a point where I decided to do both, though there have been many times when I worried that I was going to have to choose one or the other.” The attempt to juggle medicine and writing turned out to be serendipitous: after being disappointed by a taster period in psychiatry (“I discovered that years of trying to talk my mother out of vodka-soaked depressions did not guarantee an aptitude or passion for the actual work of actually helping people with mental illnesses”), he found his chosen specialty at precisely the right moment. “My medical school was kind enough to give me 6 weeks off to finish my first novel [Gob’s Grief], though they asked me to pay the time back out of elective time in my fourth year, so my paediatrics rotation got moved to the beginning of my fourth year. I had given up by then on finding a specialty, and was despairing a bit. So it was a really pleasant surprise...the medicine had a lot of attraction for me—it was like getting to be a generalist and a specialist at the same time—as did the people who practised it—they all seemed happy and they all seemed to like each other, which was clearly not always the case among the other specialties.” In Adrian’s second novel, The Children’s Hospital, a hospital is left bobbing on a 7-mile-deep ocean after www.thelancet.com Vol 381 February 2, 2013
an apocalyptic flood. It’s interesting that Adrian chose somewhere representative of his day-to-day work as a refuge for the survivors of global disaster, rather than, say, the island of Lord of the Flies, or for that matter the department store of Dawn of the Dead. Writer Katy Darby, who has directed a staged reading of Grand Rounds, one of Adrian’s short stories, highlights “the intersection of the personal and the professional, and his subtle understanding of the way life bleeds into work and vice versa” as strengths of his writing. What does Adrian feel about this “intersection”? “I suppose that as a trainee, which I’ve been while doing most of my writing, it felt like there was nothing else to write about, or that it would be somehow disingenuous to write about anything else...I tried hard to write about something else, and almost always failed. But it started to seem obvious eventually that, for me, writing about medicine was in fact writing about everything else, both because the hospital world could and did contain the whole world, and because under the cover of a hospital story my imagination could engage with absolutely any problem or obsession.” We end by discussing the issue of religion and medicine. The two used to go hand-in-hand, but now often find themselves in conflict—and the situation in the USA appears, to outsiders at least, to be increasingly polarised and bitter. Adrian is, in another twist to his career that would seem remarkable to outsiders but completely logical to those who know him, enrolled at Harvard Divinity School. What’s his take on religion versus medicine? “I think they belong at loggerheads, and I say that both as a perpetually lapsing atheist and as a chaplain-in-training. I do believe that good pastoral care and good medicine can have some things in common, and that the habits of reflection fostered in divinity training could be as useful, in some ways, to physicians as the habits of critical thinking we all learn in training.” He adds, however, that “ministers and physicians represent two vastly different and unbridgeable types of authority and enterprise that I think are in conflict for good reasons, and I think that this conflict should always only be arbitrated or resolved in the hearts of individuals, not in the policies of departments or institutions or organisations”. Adrian’s world is one full of brilliantly managed contradictions—of fantasy and reality, of science and art. I suspect his interior world is a lot like Sesame Street, too. Only with less garbage, and more giant birds.
Gus Eliot
Profile Chris Adrian: “kind of like Sesame Street”
Further reading Gob’s Grief. New York: Broadway Books, 2001 The Children’s Hospital. New York: Grove Press, 2006 A Better Angel: Stories. New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2008 The Great Night. New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2011 Grand Rounds. Granta 120: Medicine. London: Granta, 2012
Niall Boyce [email protected]
365