Lucky Man by Michael J. Fox

Audio Book, 5 1/2 hours (approx.) Read by the Author

If there is such a thing as the quintessential memoir, then it's Lucky Man. Putting aside Mr. Fox's great celebrity, Lucky Man is the story of a man's rise to greatness, his risk of destruction from hubris and his salvation through a newfound devotion to family and to the larger community. It is essentially a story of redemption, told by a man I did not think needed to be redeemed. For this reason, Lucky Man came as a pleasent surprise and ranks with the best celebrity memoirs, along with Katharine Hepburn's Me and Moss Hart's Act One.



It doesn't hurt to have a vague recollection of Mr. Fox's career, if only because he does not spend much time dwelling on his filmography. This is not a memoir for the gossip: anyone looking for dirt on his Family Ties co-stars had better go elsewhere. Certainly, we get a brief insider's glimpse of Hollywood and I finally learn why Michael J. Fox ever appeared in films like For Love or Money and Greedy (which are so forgettable that I won't even bother offering a link). But the focus of Lucky Man is the author's struggle to avoid, disguise and eventually cope with Parkinson Disease. It is this that both frames the narrative and drives it. With surprising skill, Mr. Fox crafts tension out of the smallest of moments, such as his terror at taking a physical before filming The American President because he feared discovery by the studio doctors.

Cinematic in structure - the memoir bounces quickly from one city to the next, often making great leaps in time and space - Mr. Fox connects the narrative dots in a manner most novelists would envy. The memoir is surprisingly sleek and unpadded and Mr. Fox's tone is so sincere that even his various epiphanies - some borderline maudlin - manage to come across as sincere. Perhaps this was because the audio version is read by Mr. Fox himself, but I like to think that part of Mr. Fox's fame comes from his unpretentious charm, which carries through into his writing. The book is at once a memoir, a love letter to his wife (Tracy Pollan) and an urgent plea for more attention to be paid towards Parkinson research. I won't be so cynical as to applaud his ghost wrtier; given that Mr. Fox has written other books, it's clear that acting was never his only talent. 

The end of the book almost reads like a press release from the Michael J. Fox Foundation, reminding me - of all things - of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's 1906 socialist novel. There, the final chapter abandons the narrative in favor of a socialist tract. Mr. Fox almost abandons his own narrative in favor of a passionate defense of stem cell research and the need for funding for Parkinson research. But, as with The Jungle, I was willing to forgive Mr. Fox. As a writer, Michael J. Fox had engaged me enough that he had earned the right to preach. And, unlike Mr. Sinclair, his preaching worked. The Jungle didn't turn me into a socialist, but Lucky Man did convince me to make the Fox Foundation a little richer.

As a side note, the audio book is read by the author, which makes the book an ever greater treat. Many of the stories gain sincerity when spoken by Mr. Fox himself and, although he reads in a neutral tone, his personality and comedic wit still manage to sneak through.