What Illness Can Teach Us About Uncertainty - Jonathan Gluck on his new memoir about cancer and coming to terms with not knowing
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Hi there. This is just a quick note to tell you about an incredibly exciting event that's coming up this October 11th and 12th in New York City. It's an unspeak-easy retreat on steroids.

It is not only co-ed, since you guys have been asking for it, it is going to be bigger than our usual retreats with more speakers and more participants. The lineup of speakers is still in the works. We're still adding more, but at the moment it includes, are you ready? So many friends of the podcast.

John McWhorter, Carol Hoeven, Mike Peska, Peter Moskos, Alana Newhouse, Andrew Hartz, Ben Appel, and Lisa Sellin Davis, just to name a few.

The way it's going to work is that the speakers will do panels or be interviewed, sometimes by me, sometimes by others. And pretty quickly, those panels will open up to include the attendees and it will turn into a larger discussion. Not just an audience Q&A, but a real conversation where you can interact with your intellectual heroes.

Again, this is happening October 11th and 12th in New York City. It'll go from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. Lunch is included. As with all Unspeakeasy retreats, it is off the record. No social media. We're going to sit down. We're going to concentrate. We're going to spend an amazing two days together. Spaces are limited. So go to theunspeakeasy.com slash retreats to find out how to sign up. Hope to see you there.

People would rather get the bad news than have to keep waiting. That's how much we hate uncertainty as a species and as humans. And they did experiments where people said they'd rather go ahead and get an electrical shock than keep sitting there and waiting and wondering if they were or weren't going to get it. Many people are just like, just go ahead and give it to me and let's get it over with. So it's really interesting, I mean, how much we hate uncertainty.

Welcome to the Unspeakable Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. In 2003, my guest, Jonathan Gluck, was 38 years old and happily married with a good career and a seven-month-old daughter.

It was also the year he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a relatively rare cancer that affects the blood system and bone marrow. The cancer was incurable, he was told, but also potentially manageable. For the last 22 years, he has lived with this cancer, enduring countless treatments, going in and out of remission multiple times, and has been

and learning all the while to coexist not just with physical illness, but with a condition that proves extraordinarily difficult for almost all of us, uncertainty. His new memoir, An Exercise in Uncertainty, is a story of survival, but also a story of how illness has affected every part of his life, from his physical health to the health of his marriage, his finances, and his relationships with friends, family, and the world in general.

It's a great conversation that also toward the end touches on the uncertainty of something I tend to talk a lot about around here, the changing media business. John and I were in the trenches, which for a while were very nice trenches, of the magazine business in the 1990s into the 2000s.

And we talk about how his illness trajectory, I'm not going to say journey, we'll not use that word, overlapped with the experience many of us had of losing our professional footing again and again in that business. The book was published on June 10th, and I am so pleased to bring you this conversation about it. So here's Jonathan Gluck. Jonathan Gluck, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Your new book is An Exercise in Uncertainty. It is a memoir spanning more than two decades. It's also an illness memoir, which makes it unusual, I think, in that illness memoirs are usually shorter or more contained or taking place over a shorter period of time. There's usually a beginning, middle, and end.

But your story doesn't exactly have an end. It's a story about living with an illness for a long time. So I guess I'd like to start by asking you why you decided to write this book now. Did you think about writing it at many points in the past only to think, oh, well, there will be an obvious endpoint to this story? I did. I originally wrote an essay about this experience many years ago when I was an editor at New York Magazine.

And after I wrote that essay, a number of people said to me, you know, editors or literary agents contacted me and they said asked if I'd like to possibly talk about writing a book.

And I was only three and a half years into my diagnosis at that point. And I basically felt like I had said everything I had to say in the essay. So I said to people, that's lovely of you to ask. I appreciate it. But for the time being, I'm going to hold off and, you know, I'll come back to you someday. I didn't know that would be 20 years, well, 16 and a half years later. But then a couple of funny things happened. One is...

Strangely enough, the 20th anniversary of my diagnosis kind of snuck up on me. I wasn't really aware of it until very shortly before it was about to happen, shortly in the scheme of things. And I thought, wow, you know,

That, A, a lot has happened, a great deal has happened in the intervening 16 and a half years, and B, this anniversary kind of creates a reason for me to maybe revisit this. And not least of all, just from a storytelling point of view, it gave me an end point, you

And happily, I'm still here and we're here today. So I've obviously gone on to live and enjoy my life, no less past that 20 year point. But in terms of the book, it gave me a nice stopping point where I could say like, OK, here's what's happened over these 20 years.

Your diagnosis was, is multiple myeloma. Your symptoms were certainly surprising to me as a reader and surprising to you as a patient. Can you describe the sort of origin of this whole thing symptomatically?

Yeah, it was a really strange, as you say, utterly surprising, frankly, lightning bolt out of the blue kind of experience for me. What happened was I was leaving my office. I live in New York City. I was leaving my office one night and it was just kind of it wasn't even winter. It wasn't snowing. It was just one of those nights was sort of in between rain and sleet. And the sidewalk outside of my office was a little bit slippery.

And I walked out and I twisted my hip and it was nothing. It's the type of thing. And I was 37 years old at the time. It's the type of thing that you wouldn't expect would cause any lingering damage. But I woke up the next morning and it really hurt. And I thought to myself, it's probably some orthopedic injury. You know, I've had stuff like that before. Maybe I pulled a muscle or something to do with a ligament or tendon or something.

And I kind of forgot about it for a while. And a couple months went past and it didn't get better. So I went and I saw my orthopedist and he took a simple x-ray, didn't see anything, had the same general instinct that it was probably something that would resolve on its own. I was very busy. I had a subsequently had my first child, my daughter, AJ. I was busy and working in a new job, you know, just doing the things we all do like life was happening. And so, yeah,

I put off seeing the doctor again, even though my hip never stopped hurting. Came to be about a year later and I realized, wow, this has been going on for a year. That doesn't seem right. I should probably see the doctor. This time he ordered an MRI and

This is how naive I was. His physician's assistant called me after the day or two after the MRI and said, oh, Dr. Weiner would like to see you to talk about your test results. And I thought, oh, how lovely. You know, there aren't that many doctors who do that anymore, you know, who really want to talk to you in person. And I got there. And the second I got there, I sensed something was up because they came right out like and took me straight to an examining room.

And Dr. Wiener, a lovely, lovely man and brilliant doctor who frankly saved my life, said, you know, sat me down and looked at me straight in the eye and as professionally as he could, but also with a trace of real emotion in his voice, said, you know, he didn't waste time. He just said, there's a lesion on your hip. And I said, okay.

what is a lesion? You mean like a tumor? And he said, yes. And I said, does that mean I have cancer? And he said, yes. And so I went from one moment to the next, no family history, no reason to believe, you know, no known, you know, risk factors and boom, you know, out of the blue, 37 years, 37 years old, 38 years old at that time, seven month old daughter, new job,

new apartment, a lot of stuff going on. And bam, there was, you know, a very serious diagnosis. So who was the first person that you called in that moment or after that moment? So it's a strange thing. You know, the first person I called was my boss to say I wasn't going to be able to come into work that day. The appointment was quite early, I think eight or nine in the morning. And, you know, I've thought about this since, and I think it was just a

you know, a denial mechanism or something, a way to delay telling anybody who I felt more deeply and personally connected to. And it was also the first of what would turn out to be a million, you know, examples of just distracting myself, I think. Like, you know, I didn't want to think about the enormous, unfathomable, almost consequences of what I had just heard. So I did something just banal and easy that we all do, like, oh, I've got a conflict now, I can't go to work.

And I don't know, somehow that was mildly normalizing or something. So and I didn't tell her why. I just said this was in the days of voicemail still. I just said, you know, I'm afraid I've something's come up and I can't come into work today. But it gave me just I don't know, like I say, a tiny sense of normalcy, I think. At one point, I don't know if it was the same day. I can't remember. You go to your therapist, which is such a New York City thing to do.

What was that about? Yeah, I mean, it occurred to me that this was obviously an enormous thing to deal with emotionally, never mind physically, and that she was kind of perfectly positioned to help me. She's a trained professional. I had been working with her for a number of years already. We knew each other super well. I knew she was a very caring and sympathetic person.

And I thought she would have good advice or at the very least help me calm down a little so I could figure out what I wanted to do next. And it just seemed like a place where I could go and stabilize things, however momentarily possible.

And not, again, have to talk to somebody who I knew I would, you know, you know, would be much more emotionally intense. My wife, first and foremost, other family members, friends, whoever. I think in retrospect, even just talking to you now, as I piece this together, I was like inching my way up to talking to somebody who I really felt would, you know, hit home and just looking for tiny little bridges to get there.

So what was the conversation with your wife, Didi, like when you ultimately had it?

So one of the things Dr. Gohl, my therapist, suggested while I was there was she said, do you want to ask Dede? Because, of course, top of my list was, you know, how on earth am I going to tell my wife? And she said, would you like to tell her here, invite her to come over? And so I called her and said, you know, hey, I'm at Dr. Gohl's. Something very serious has come up. And I decided to come here. Can you come here right away? And I'll tell you more.

And she of course said yes.

came over right away and she knew something obviously very serious was up. So as she came into the room and Dr. Gold had a very traditional sort of couch that I used to lie on. But in this instance, I was just sitting there upright and Didi came and sat right next to me and just took my hand. She knew it wasn't going to be good. Um, and I told her and, uh, she just held my hand and said she was sorry. And, you know, um,

was ready to listen and help in any way she could. Did she ever tell you what she thought it might be? Was there sort of a list of scenarios going through her head or did she assume it was an illness or something like that? Or, you know, was there a part of her that was like, oh my gosh, like, has he committed a crime? Like what was running through her head?

That was a taste of my interview with author Jonathan Gluck. His new memoir, An Exercise in Uncertainty, was just published on June 10th. If you want to hear the rest of this conversation, and I think you do, it's pretty good, go to theunspeakablepodcast.com and become a paying subscriber.

It's a great time to do that because in addition to being able to hear the rest of this conversation and every conversation on this podcast, you can be part of my book club for my book, The Catastrophe Hour.

It is a collection of 14 essays. We are reading one essay per week for 14 weeks. This is reserved for paying subscribers who subscribe at the annual level, which is super easy to do. So go there and join the listener community and get in on those meetings. They're every Wednesday from 3 to 4 p.m. Eastern time. I will be back next week with another super nuanced guest. Thanks for listening. See you then.

That was my interview with Jonathan Gluck. His new memoir, An Exercise in Uncertainty, was just published on June 10th. Speaking of books, are you a member of the Catastrophe Hour Book Club? This is the thing where I'm talking about my new book.

It's a collection of essays. There's 14 of them. What are we doing? We're doing a weekly book club for 14 weeks. We're going to talk about one essay per week. It's happening on Wednesdays from 3 to 4 p.m. Eastern Time. Started on June 11th and...

We are underway. What can I say? This is for paying subscribers of the Substack that subscribe at the yearly level. That's probably a lot of you. If you're just paying monthly, this is a great opportunity to just shift over to the yearly level, which is actually cheaper for you anyway. So to find out about that, go to theunspeakablepodcast.com or megandown.substack.com. It is a lot of fun. So I hope you'll do that. I also hope you'll check out information about our

Retreatapalooza, Unspeakeasy, Unsteroids, New York.

New York City event happening this October 11th and 12th in New York. Like I just said, we're going to have amazing guest speakers. This is going to be unlike anything we've ever done and probably anything you've ever experienced. So go to the unspeakeasy.com slash retreats to find out about that. In the meantime, I will be back next week with another super nuanced guest. See you then.