On December 8th of 1995, the editor-in-chief of the French fashion magazine Elle, Jean-Dominique Bauby, suffered a massive stroke which severed his brain stem from his spinal cord and rendered the worldly, charismatic, fashionable man nearly completely paralyzed. After awakening from a coma in January of 1996, Bauby found that the only way he could communicate with the outside world was by blinking his left eyelid—the single part of his body over which he had any remaining control. Over the summer of 1996, with the help of his speech therapist at the Berck-sur-Mer hospital in the north of France, Sandrine, and an interpreter, Claude, Bauby composed, letter by painstaking letter, a memoir of his experiences in the hospital, his memories of his life before the stroke, and his deepest, most vulnerable fantasies of returning to a normal existence.
As Bauby spends the summer of 1996 blinking out the sentences of his memoir, he reflects on his “locked-in syndrome” which has left him feeling like he is encased in a heavy diving bell, and provides an account of his monotonous, tiresome, but occasionally illuminating life in the hospital. He describes the “tourist” patients whose prognoses will allow them to depart the hospital in just a few short months; he entertains visits from his former partner Sylvie and their children Céleste and Théophile, whom he worries his remoteness and paralysis frightens, as well as old friends and coworkers; by sending a monthly bulletin to his rivals at Elle, he attempts to quell rumors on the streets of Paris that the once-powerful editor has become a “vegetable;” he gets through sponge baths and tube feedings by imagining luxurious soaks in his tub at home in Paris and delicious meals from his childhood. He imagines being a movie director at Cinecittá studios in Rome and a member of the royal coterie of Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III; he endures physical therapy and speech therapy; he wrestles with terrible nightmares and the fear that his loved ones are slipping away from him. He recounts humorous and ironic anecdotes from his past, divulges dreams of writing a play based on his experiences as a paraplegic, and imagines himself accompanying his former Elle coworkers on luxurious trips to exotic locations for conferences and fashion expos.
Bauby’s swirling anecdotes, expressed through short chapters which reflect the fleeting, carousel-like nature of his overactive thoughts—his only refuge—unfold quickly and come to a halting stop after Bauby, in the book’s penultimate pages, recounts in detail the fateful day of his stroke. Bauby concludes that he has composed his memoir as a way of searching for a “key” that will allow him to free himself from the diving bell, but admits that he feels he must “keep looking” throughout the “cosmos” for the magical object, spell, or miracle that will ferry him to freedom.
