It's Not Yet Dark

July 10, 2017
In 2008, shortly after his short film The Sound of People was chosen to be shown at the Sundance Film Festival, Irish director Fitzmaurice was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease and, at age 33, was told he had “three or four years to live.” This powerful and moving memoir captures his struggles with ALS, “the seesaw balance of strength and weakness” that he experienced daily, the strain ALS put on his wife and children, and his eventually successful efforts to convince the hospital to allow him to use a ventilator to remain alive. Fitzmaurice is unsparing in his description of his condition: “ALS does not let you rest. It does not let you adapt. It does not give you space. ALS takes and keeps taking.” The ventilator added years to his life, and although he cannot move his arms or legs and can’t breathe “without a machine helping me day and night,” he learned to use an eye-gaze computer to communicate and made a new feature film (My Name Is Emily, which premiered at Sundance in 2017). The heart of this inspirational book is Fitzmaurice's perseverance (“They gave me my life and I wouldn’t give it up”) and his unflagging belief “in the power to take what life throws at you and slowly to come back, to take all you have and not be crushed by sadness and loss.”