When Breath Becomes Air
When Breath Becomes Air is the posthumously published memoir of Paul Kalanithi, a gifted neurosurgeon who was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at the age of 36, just as he was completing a decade of training and preparing to begin his career. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a runaway bestseller, it is one of the most widely read meditations on illness and meaning of its generation.
The book moves between two lives: Kalanithi's path into medicine and literature — the questions about mortality and the mind that drew him to neurosurgery — and his abrupt transformation from the doctor delivering diagnoses to the patient receiving one. With clarity and candor, he confronts what makes a life meaningful when the future he planned is taken away, and how to keep living fully while dying.
Left unfinished at his death in 2015 and completed with an epilogue by his wife, Lucy, When Breath Becomes Air is a spare, unsentimental, and profoundly humane reckoning with mortality, vocation, and love.
This memoir is based on the real-life experiences of Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. It chronicles his personal journey as he transitions from doctor to patient.
The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. It also received the Wellcome Book Prize.
A stage adaptation of the memoir premiered at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.