Rating: 4 out of 5

Wow but Oliver Sacks had a brilliant mind. This memoir seemed to hop around quite a bit from time to time and I got lost a few times but no regrets about spending time with him. And I’ve resolved to read another of his books before the year is out. Tho I might have to re-read Insomniac City - Bill Hayes’s beautiful love story for Oliver and for New York - first.

Highlighted passage:

I suspect my nostalgia may be not only for the place itself, but for youth, and a very different time, and being in love, and being able to say ‘The future is before me’

My sense of England as ‘home’ took a beating in 1990, when my father died and the house on Mapesbury Road - where I was born and brought up and which I revisited and often stayed in when I returned to England, the house of which every inch was suffused for me with memories and emotions - was sold. I no longer felt I had a place to go back to, and my visits thereafter felt like visits and not like returns to my own country and people.

Originally posted to my Goodreads account