Dr. Oliver Sacks was “morbidly shy,” as one of the interlocutors in this collection notes—which may be why there were relatively few formal interviews with the great neuroscientist, physician, and bestselling author.
It’s rather surprising, considering Sacks’s long career and prolific output. Between 1970 and 2015, he wrote fourteen books, including Awakenings (which was adapted into a film starring Robin Williams), the blockbuster The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and On the Move, a memoir published just six months before his death in August 2015. He was also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, among other publications.
For the most part, what seems to have convinced Sacks to grant interviews was the obligation to promote his work, and so the rarities collected herein were each conducted to coincide with the publication of a book and were broadcast on major programs such as Charlie Rose’s PBS television show, National Public Radio’s Fresh Air program, and the beloved icon Studs Terkel’s radio show. They are primarily accessible in audio format, and several were transcribed here for the first time by Melville House.
In these transcriptions, we endeavored to preserve Sacks’s verbal characteristics—for example, his charming tendency to stutter and to often qualify his comments with the disclaimer “sort of.” Readers will also notice that some interviewers interrupt more than others (indicated with an em dash), and some are decidedly unhurried, relishing contemplative pauses (indicated with an ellipsis).
The first interview, the first of several Sacks had with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, offers an introduction to the doctor’s uniquely literary approach to his work—“describing states of mind as well as neurological conditions.” Both of the interviews that follow—with Charlie Rose and Studs Terkel, respectively—were released after the publication of the book An Anthropologist on Mars, but they take distinct approaches to their subject. The Rose interview is more obviously personal, even philosophical: Sacks discusses his family, his friendship with Robin Williams, his appreciation of the brain as an “unimaginably complex and beautiful” part of who we are, and his longing for faith in a God he cannot, in the end, believe exists. The interview with Terkel, meanwhile, hews closely to the book itself, but in doing so reveals the inner workings of the author, whom Terkel introduces as “a wonder of a neurologist, who has the soul of a poet but the writing gifts of a fine novelist.”
The remaining interviews—with Lisa Burrell for the Harvard Business Review, Tom Ashbrook for NPR’s On Point, and Robert Krulwich for NPR’s Radiolab—were all conducted after Sacks was diagnosed with ocular cancer in 2005. They address mortality more directly, and explore the ways in which Sacks’s relationships to his patients had changed, now that he was a patient as well. Ashbrook’s interview was conducted shortly after Sacks’s eightieth birthday, when he’d been inspired to write an op-ed for The New York Times about his contentedness in old age (“I can write up a storm, and I can swim up a storm … I think swimming is one of the few activities one can do for the first century”).
The final interview was presented to a live audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on May 5, 2015, after Radiolab’s host Robert Krulwich had visited Sacks and recorded their conversation in his home. It is by far the most poignant in the collection. Sacks was keenly aware that this interview was to be among his last. Of his latest diagnosis, Sacks said, “One or two people have written to me, you know, consoling me, and said, ‘Well, you know, we all die.’ But fuck it! It’s not like, We all die. It’s like, You have four months.” It’s poignant, too, for the decades-long friendship between Krulwich and Sacks, which is evoked in the candor and wonderful intimacy of their dialogue.
The conversations collected herein, then, span nearly thirty years and cover a range of topics, but they are unified by the spirit of warmth, empathy, and ingenious curiosity for which Sacks was so famous and rightly beloved.