Just got this email from Gary Greenberg – a good friend, a soulful psychologist, an excellent writer, and a damn fine musician to boot:
As if there weren’t already too many books in the world, now I’ve gone and published one. It’s called The Noble Lie, and it’s about what happens when doctors try to diagnose away our moral confusion. You know, like when they say that a person whose brain has stopped working, but who is still breathing and still has a beating heart, is actually already dead, so it’s okay to remove his organs. Or that a person who is miserable has a brain disease, so it’s okay for her to take drugs that make her feel better. Or that a man who falls in love with a man ought to be able to marry him because he was born that way rather than because in a life that will drive you to your knees with alarming frequency, love is rare and should be encouraged in all its forms.
The idea–to the extent that there is one–is that these diagnoses are myths that we live by, and like all myths both indispensable and fragile, hard to live without and nearly impossible to sustain. But mostly the book is a series of strange stories–about people who come back from the dead and people who think they will never die, about a serial killer who wants to be thought of as evil rather than sick and a convicted drug kingpin who wants to cure drug addicts by giving them a dangerous hallucinogen, about straight people who become gay and gay people who become straight. It’s got sex and drugs and, if you read it with your ipod on, rock and roll, and you’ll get to see me beg for an audience with the Unabomber, weasel my way into a clinical trial, and get into a life-threatening situation with a guy who thinks he will live forever. You’ve seen some of these stories before, in places like The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Mother Jones, but there’s plenty of new stuff, including my visit to the Wet Spot, one of America’s best sex clubs.
Publisher’s Weekly called The Noble Lie ”muddled,” which makes sense, since the point is to re-muddle what should probably never have been un-muddled in the first place. New Scientist called it “impressive and fascinating“. The book hits the shelves today. Read it and decide for yourself.
Here is the publisher’s catalog page for the book.
I have ordered my copy and will report back when I’ve finished reading it.
