The Tennis Partner
by Abraham Verghese
List Price: $14.00
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060174056
Publisher: HarperCollins
Born to Indian parents in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1955, Abraham Verghese earned his medical degree at Madras Medical College in India in 1980 before emigrating to the United States. He spent three years, from 1980 to 1983, as a resident in Internal Medicine at East Tennessee State University and then began a fellowship to study infectious diseases at Boston University. In 1985, Verghese returned to Johnson City, Tennessee, and started a practice in internal medicine. His experiences there with HIV-infected patients became the basis of his 1994 bestseller My Own Country, which was made into a television movie for 'Showtime'. Verghese is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has published short stories and essays in The New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times, among many other publications. Now a professor of medicine at Texas Tech University, Verghese lives in El Paso with his wife, Sylvia, and three sons. He is currently putting together a collection of his short stories.
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Q: Was it difficult for you to find the form and narrative voice of the book?
A: It was a real struggle to find the right structure for the book.
It took me a while to realize that I was a major character in the story
and that it was not possible to tell David's story without also telling
my story. I find that I write best when I'm writing in a personal voice.
In many ways my voice in THE TENNIS PARTNER is parallel to my posture
as a clinician -- the voice emanates from my daily routine of seeing patients,
going to work. It's the voice of an internist, the bedside sleuth who
is always conscious of the subtext, of appearances, of things beneath
the surface.
Q: You have a demanding full-time career in medicine, you have a wife and
three children. When do you find time to write?
A: I tend to write in the early mornings from about 4 AM until
I go to work at 6:30 AM. I write on a computer but I never edit on the
computer. I think it's a fallacy to credit the computer with making the
editing process so easy. I'm more inclined to say "these 30 pages belong
here" or "these 50 pages need to disappear" when I have a tactile sense
of a sheaf of papers in my hands. I try to work every day but there are
long spells when I don't. But I do try to make journal entries every day.
Q: Did you have any sense of violating a taboo by writing so intimately about
your friendship with David?
A. A bit of both. It's certainly true that men are reticent to
talk of their deepest friendships -- not that men do not experience these
relationships emotionally, but to write about them is to get accused of
being sentimental. And yet, women write so eloquently about their friendships;
gay men write beautifully about their loves. I wanted to write movingly
about this deep bond I had with another heterosexual male. The real taboo
I felt was not in writing about the friendship but in violating the silence
surrounding suicide.
Q. Near the end of the book you write of David, "perhaps he was drawn to
doctoring because he subconsciously thought that if he attended to the pain
of others, it would take care of his own." Is this a common problem for
doctors?
A: Many of the people drawn to medicine tend to be introverted
and over-achievers. To deal with one's own insecurities through medicine
is not a bad thing -- it often makes for an empathetic and caring doctor.
But when doctors get stressed and troubled, they have difficulty acknowledging
their own emotions or the fact that they are sick. You then have the paradox
of the humane doctor who denies his patienthood and shows little humanity
for himself. Instead of their dealing with the underlying emotions or
stressors, the physician will focus on a symptom--pain, for example--and
begin to medicate himself. This is often how addiction begins.
Q: At one point in the book you scoff at the notion of sexual addiction as a
"cute recovery label" and yet David insists that it is the key to his problems.
Have your views on sexual addiction changed since writing the book?
A: There are many people for whom sex becomes like a drug, especially
people engaging in criminal sexual behavior. This is a controversial issue,
and I actually wrote about it for the New Yorker at about the time we
learned of Clinton's affair. Claiming to be sexually addicted can be an
easy out, a way of not taking responsibility for your behavior. "I can't
help it, it's my disease." I also think that the notion of sexual addiction
plays into the hands of the extreme right, the people who insist on taking
Playboy off the newsstands because it can trigger an addiction. In David's
case, it was a problem he could have exercised more control over. Linking
sexual addiction with cocaine got him off the hook for all of those things.
Q: What kinds of reactions have you gotten from male readers?
A. So far, the men I have encountered while on book tours have
responded very well. Many have spoken of their deep friendships with men
and what they value about the book is that I have given voice to feelings
they have experienced, but have never spoken about. These friendships
are not incidental to our lives but vital to our well-being. When we acknowledge
them and make the most of them, to that degree we're healthy.
Q: In the book you never press David hard to reveal personal information --
you're careful not to pry. Were you frustrated at how much he kept from you?
A: When David was healthy he was as open with me as I was with
him. But when he was getting ready to relapse, one of the first signals
was his increasing secrecy, his inability to access who he was. They commonly
say in AA, "In your secrets lie your addictions," and I saw this with
David. My hope was that the reader would share my frustration with David,
and understand that when someone is relapsing you can't get through to
him -- that is the nature of addiction.
Q: You clearly had mixed emotions about beating David in that one tennis
match. Can you talk about the difficulty of helping and supporting a
vulnerable person with whom you are also in competition?
A: In many ways that tennis victory was a fluke, a matter of four
points at the end. If he'd been determined to win, he would have. My intent
was not to beat him but to play the best game I could. It came to that
point at the end and then it was as if fate took over. That's how I sensed
our friendship developing. It depended on fate. I felt I had been doing
the best I could for the friendship -- and at some point my attitude was
"let the chips fall as they may."
Q: Near the book's end you quote David's sponsor as saying, "David is
responsible for David," and yet clearly you clearly felt an urgent desire to
help him and even save him if you could. Have you resolved this in your own
mind?
A: David had a disease. I think I only fully realized this when
I visited the Talbott Center and saw all of those physicians whose lives
had been shattered by addictions. David's addiction was a disease, not
a character flaw. David more than anyone else knew that and understood
that he had a responsibility to service his disease, the same way a diabetic
services his disease by checking his blood sugar level and taking insulin.
I couldn't treat David's disease -- it was his responsibility to do that
and no one else could have done that for him. This was something that
I came to accept and understand when I was writing the book. It was cathartic
because until I wrote it I felt a tremendous amount of guilt.
Courtesy of HarperCollins, Inc.
© Copyright 2009 by Abraham Verghese. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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