Dear Oliver: An Unexpected Friendship with Oliver Sacks

Neurobiologist Barry (Fixing My Gaze) offers a nuanced and moving look at her relationship with renowned neurologist Sacks (1933–2015), whom she got to know after becoming one of his case studies. The two first met, briefly, in 1996, at a reception for Barry’s astronaut husband, but it was only in 2005 that Barry wrote to Sacks to share that, with the recent intervention of an optometrist, she’d regained sight in both eyes after strabismus (crossed eyes) had led to blindness in one. Her letter elicited an enthusiastic response from Sacks, who asked for permission to write about Barry’s experiences. The ensuing essay, “Stereo Sue,” explained the challenges involved with a lack of stereoscopic (two-eyed) vision. Over the next decade, Barry and Sacks became close friends, exchanging more than 150 letters before Sacks’s death from cancer. Barry conveys the deep warmth and compassion these late-in-life confidants offered each other—and even includes images of Sacks’s type-written letters, complete with cross-outs and handwritten additions—making the book’s later sections, which document how Sacks’s cancer spread and became terminal, especially poignant. It adds up to a deeply stirring ode to life-altering connections that arrive when they’re least expected. Agent: Lisa Adams, Garamond Agency. (Jan.)