Recommendations
Books Like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Best books to read after The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was written by blinking — a meditation on consciousness and the body from inside locked-in syndrome. These recommendations explore the memoir of illness and disability tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the short book that uses a physical constraint to illuminate what it means to be conscious and alive.
- 1Buy
On Immunity
by Eula Biss
The literary essay companion in thinking about the body — Biss's meditation on vaccination, contamination, and what it means to be a mother in a body vulnerable to disease; shares Bauby's interest in the relationship between the inner life and the body's vulnerability.
- 2Buy
When Breath Becomes Air
by Paul Kalanithi
The neurosurgeon-facing-death companion — Paul Kalanithi's memoir of being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer while finishing his neurosurgical residency; like Bauby's book, a short, crystalline account of what remains when the body begins to fail.
- 3Buy
Being Mortal
by Atul Gawande
The medical companion on mortality — Gawande's examination of how medicine handles aging and dying and what a good end of life looks like; the nonfiction companion for readers who loved Bauby's meditation on what the body means when it can no longer perform.
- 4Buy
The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
The grief memoir companion — Didion's year after her husband John Gregory Dunne died suddenly at the dinner table, the account of grief that most shares Bauby's quality of a refined literary mind trying to understand what has happened to its world.
- 5Buy
A Still Small Voice
by Henry David Thoreau
The essential consciousness predecessor — Walden, Thoreau's two years in a cabin attending carefully to what the mind experiences when the world becomes very small; the ancestor of the tradition Bauby writes in.
- 6Buy
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Film
by Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel's 2007 film adaptation won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the César Award for Best Film. Shot mostly from inside the diving bell — using Bauby's left eye as the camera — it is the rare film that deepens rather than simplifies the book.
- 7Buy
Tuesdays with Morrie
by Mitch Albom
The popular death-and-meaning companion — Albom's conversations with his dying sociology professor Morrie Schwartz, the other short book about a man facing physical dissolution that most readers who loved Bauby's memoir are drawn to.
- 8Buy
Still Alice
by Lisa Genova
The consciousness-and-loss companion novel — Alice Howland, a Harvard linguistics professor, and her early-onset Alzheimer's diagnosis; Genova's novel shares Bauby's concern with the experience of watching one's own mind or body change in ways the self cannot prevent.
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