A searing memoir about devastating illness, creativity, sex and drugs, and thirty-something life in New York.Joshua Cody, a brilliant young composer, was about to receive his PhD when he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. Facing a bone-marrow transplant and full radiation, he charts his struggle: the fury, the tendency to self-destruction, and the ruthless grasping for life and sensation; the encounter with a strange woman on Canal Street that leads to sex at his apartment; the detailed morphine fantasy complete with a bride called Valentina while, in reality, hospital staff are pinning him to his bed. Moving effortlessly between references to Don Giovanni and the Rolling Stones, Ezra Pound and Buffalo Bill, and facsimiles of his own diaries and hospital notebooks, [sic] is a cross between Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and Jay McInerny's Bright Lights, Big City: a mesmerizing, hallucinatory glimpse into a young man's battle against disease and a celebration of art, language, music, and life. 30 black-and-white illustrations