The Story of an Illness

Abstract

On 12 December, 1981 Heller was returning to his New York apartment with his friend Speed Vogel when he experienced an inexplicable difficulty in opening the door and in pulling off his sweater. These were the first tell-tale signs of the onset of a serious disease of his nervous system, the Guillain—Barre Syndrome, which paralysed him completely within the next few days and which was to lay him low for months. The seizure interrupted Heller in the middle of writing God Knows, by coincidence the narrative of a ‘character who is so weak he can’t get out of bed’. Because it had all been planned out carefully beforehand, when Heller returned to the manuscript he began introducing a few new physical details about David’s weakness, but otherwise the com-position of the novel was comparatively unaffected.¹