Narrative nonfiction56,751 wordsPrologue, thirty-one chapters
in six parts, and a codaComplete manuscript

Come On, Marky

Name: Come On, Marky
Author: Mark E. Paull

A memoir in recursive time

A chart holds outcomes. It does not hold the thinking that produced them. This is a book by a man who wrote the thinking down anyway, starting at eleven, and never stopped.

The instruments changed across sixty years — urine testing gave way to blood meters, then pumps, then continuous monitors, then systems that dose on their own. The central human task did not. Someone still has to read incomplete information and decide what to do next, and that decision is the thing no record was built to keep.

The book is recursive rather than chronological, which is where the subtitle comes from. Events return more than once and go further each time, because that is how the understanding actually arrived — years apart. It is not a brave-patient book. The record contains its own betrayals, including years of deliberate non-compliance written down as faithfully as the years of doing it well, and the manuscript does not sand them off.

It is a memoir first. Everything else in it comes up through the story.

The paper record is gone. The notebooks were destroyed in a flood, along with some ten thousand negatives and slides from the author's years as a professional photographer. He has not rebuilt them and will not: a record reconstructed backward from memory is not a record. The manuscript handles this once, late, and without elegy.

What the book is aboutThe diagnosis is the condition of the story, not the subject of it

Learning before the instruments could tell you anything

Improvisation, secrecy, embarrassment, and judgment acquired the expensive way.

Becoming the only expert on one body

Experience is not infallibility. It is accumulated prediction, correction and consequence.

More data, a different blindness

Every new instrument makes more visible and makes the missing context more conspicuous.

The people who live beside an invisible system

The witnesses who notice what a chart cannot.

Where the argument stops being abstract

The death of a son, and what it does to the scale of every earlier question.

What survives when the archive does not

Paper records, embodied knowledge, and the stories a life can still carry after the paper is gone.

Where it sits

A shelf that has been empty a long time.

The nearest comparisons are recent and they are trade: Meghan O'Rourke's The Invisible Kingdom and Suzanne O'Sullivan's The Age of Diagnosis — two book-length arguments about how medicine sees, labels and records the person in front of it, one from the patient's chair and one from the clinician's. That audience has bought the argument twice in three years.

So far as the author has been able to establish, there is no literary trade memoir of Type 1 diabetes written from inside the experience rather than about it. What the shelf holds is instruction and encouragement. The last book of any consequence written from inside this disease by someone living it appears to be Playing for Life, Billy Talbert's story, published in 1958. Talbert was diagnosed in 1928, six years after the discovery of insulin. He appears in this book.

Status: complete manuscript. It is not self-published and is not for sale here. The proposal, synopsis and sample chapters are available privately on request — manuscript enquiries.

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