Imagine waking up to find you’re a foreigner in your own body, and you suddenly can’t communicate as you used to with the people you love. What would you do? How would you adapt? How would you survive?
This was the scenario that greeted Jean-Dominique Bauby in December 1995. The brilliant French journalist and editor of Elle magazine suffered a massive stroke, leaving him in a coma for nearly three weeks. When he finally woke up, there was a chasm between his mental acuity and his physical abilities. While his brain was fully aware and active, his mouth, arms, and legs were paralyzed.
But he could still blink.
And so, with the help of his interlocutor, Claude Mendibil, Bauby wrote the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly with hundreds of thousands of blinks. He chose the title because his body’s prison-like state became a diving bell—the heavy brass apparatus housing divers below the sea—while his mind, the butterfly, gave him the solace of endless fantasies and memories.
Bauby planned and conceived the book entirely in his own head. The writing process involved Mendibil slowly reciting the alphabet over and over until the correct letter was reached. When she said the letter he wanted, Bauby blinked. In a wise move, and to make dictation a bit smoother, Mendibil listed the letters by frequency, not alphabetically. Each word, on average, took roughly two minutes to write.
Bauby died of pneumonia days after his book was published, but his story lives on. The book became an international bestseller and was turned into an acclaimed feature film. (If you have not yet seen it, you should seek it out. It has a 94% critic rating and 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.)