In his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death, written during his long hospitalization and published two days before his death in 1997, he portrayed both the excruciating minutiae of his life in the hospital, away from both his Paris home and any previously familiar means of motion, speech, or independence, as well as the ways in which he allowed his mind to take him far away from the suffering of his body, transporting him to places real and imagined, visited or only read-about, that he explored silently, letting his mind wander and venture off as he waited for the minutes of each day to tick by. Bauby’s mind was lucid, his thoughts were coherent, and-not being able to move or speak to express himself-his imagination was working overtime. The story is by now famous: in 1995, ELLE editor-in-chief Jean-Dominique Bauby had a stroke that left him experiencing “locked-in syndrome,” in which all voluntary muscles were completely paralyzed except for the ones that controlled the movements of his left eye.
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