Terminally ill reporter wrote memoir with her single Thumb
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Susan Spencer-Wendel wrote her life story on an iPhone using only her right thumb, as all her other fingers have stopped functioning since she was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease in the summer of 2011.
The memoir, titled 'Until I Say Goodbye' took her three months to write and it will be published in March.
HarperCollins paid her $2 million for the story, which will be translated into 25 languages, and Universal paid $2 million more for movie rights.
HarperCollins calls Susan’s story 'a powerfully emotional, inspirational and irrepressibly joyous look at the things that matter most… Until I Say Goodbye is the fulfillment of her final wish: "To make people laugh and cry and hug their children and joke with their friends and dwell in how wonderful it is to be alive."'
Just as the book hits store shelves, Spencer-Wendel expects she will have lost her ability to speak.
'My decline is speeding up: each day I lose more steps and words,' Spencer-Wendel wrote in an e-mail to her former employer, the Palm Beach Post.
'I now choke at most every meal, episodes which leave people around me screaming "Should we call 911?" Ergo, I don’t eat much anymore.'
She believes she just celebrated her last holiday season.
'I knew it would be this way,' she said. 'So for Thanksgiving we had our major holiday event. Our entire families — 40 in all — came. Was wonderful. Hectic, but wonderful.'
For Christmas, she asked for a ring that could be passed as an heirloom to her daughter, Marina, 15, or the future fiancees of one of her two sons one day.
Mine is a story of twinning good and bad fortunes, which I find profound meaning in,' she wrote. 'I read every day a passage about joy and sorrow from Kahlil Gibran’s "The Prophet." It is about how "the deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain."'
'"Is not the cup which holds your wine the very cup burned in the potter’s oven?"
'I believe this,' she added. 'That in the long trajectory of my family’s lives, a deep sorrow now will open worlds of feeling for them in the future.
'This comforts me, brings me great peace. And the ability to delight in today and today alone.'
When she found out about her diagnosis, she quit her job as a courts reporter for the Post and planned a series of bucket-list trips, including a trip to Canada's Yukon Territory with a best friend and another to
Budapest with her husband of 20 years.
Details of her sojourns were published in the Florida-based newspaper, to an unprecedented reader response, and she transformed her dispatches into the memoir.
Readers have been impressed by the writer's stoic attitude to her illness, summed up by her declaration: 'Our decision [is] to just be. Accept. Live with joy anyhow. And die with joy, too.'
The BOOK
