What Days Are For A Memoir

by Dessaix, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780857989017
• ISBN10: 0857989014
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2016-05-01
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Summary

One Sunday night in Sydney, Robert Dessaix collapses in a gutter in Darlinghurst, and is helped to his hotel by a kind young man wearing a T-shirt that says FUCK YOU. What follows are weeks in hospital, tubes and cannulae puncturing his body, as he recovers from the heart attack threatening daily to kill him. While lying in the hospital bed, Robert chances upon Philip Larkin’s poem "Days." What, he muses, have his days been for? What and who has he loved—and why? This is vintage Robert Dessaix. His often surprisingly funny recollections range over topics as eclectic as intimacy, travel, spirituality, enchantment, language, and childhood, all woven through with a heightened sense of mortality.

Author Biography

Robert Dessaix is a writer, translator, broadcaster, and occasional essayist. From 1985 to 1995, after teaching Russian language and literature for many years at the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales, he presented the weekly Books and Writing program on ABC Radio National. In more recent years he has also presented radio series on Australian public intellectuals and great travelers in history, as well as regular programs on language. He is the author of the novel Night Letters and the travel memoir Twilight of Love.