TIME ON FIRE: My Comedy of Terrors

Based on the author's one-man off-Broadway show, a candid memoir of illness and survival describes his diagnosis with acute myeloid leukemia, his bizarre odyssey in and out of medical centers and hospitals, and his humor and determination in the face of fear. 20,000 first printing. $30,000 ad/promo. Tour.

While some adaptations from theater go limp as prose, Handler has expanded his off-Broadway play about surviving leukemia into a captivating memoir. Laced with anger, punctuated by humor and fueled by his indomitable will to survive, Handler's story is entertaining, harrowing and ennobling. A successful actor, at 24 he was forced to face his mortality. He provides gimlet-eyed portraits of an often uncaring (yet sometimes deeply loving) medical world and the ugly procedures he must undergo. To survive, Handler learned "opportunistic optimism," drawing on inspirational literature, even consulting a psychic, all the while aided by his girlfriend, Jackie. He's forced to confront his family's craziness and his own emotional traumas. He can find humor in retelling his predicament?as in describing hospital sex?while his accounts of the mental bargains he and other patients make suggest a reckoning with ultimates. Readers will be appalled at instances of the often substandard medical treatment he receives and spellbound by his attempts to monitor his recovery. Considering himself "one of the very luckiest of the unluckiest people," Handler speaks with a fresh voice that is entirely riveting. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Until he was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 24, Handler was a talented actor with a promising Broadway career and all the time in the world. But the bleak prognosis transformed time into "a concrete entity" not to be wasted. Resigning his understudy's role in Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues, Handler checked himself into New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, embarking on a five-year battle to get a second chance at life and time. Adapted from his successful off-Broadway one-man play, Time on Fire recounts with grim humor Handler's hellish journey through the land of the sick: insensitive doctors; experimental chemotherapies sometimes worse than the illness; awkward sex with his girlfriend in a hospital bathroom; remission, relapse, remission. Self-absorbed (with the actor's desire to be at the center of attention), Handler does not always come across as an admirable figure; he was hard on his supportive parents and girlfriend. "I must have been sheer hell to be around," he admits. "But I know it saved my life on several occasions." His honesty and tenacity, however, enable readers to cheer his eventual recovery. For popular collections.
Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.