Lucky ManA Memoir

Michael J. Fox reveals himself as a courageous and indefatigable optimist
If you were alive in America during the 1980s, chances are you tuned in religiously to laugh at Michael J. Fox's antics as the infuriatingly lovable, Nixon-worshiping Alex P. Keaton in the hit sitcom Family Ties. And if you were a teen girl, it is a pretty good bet that you also tacked up Tiger Beat posters of Fox on your bedroom walls. When Fox played Marty McFly in Back to the Future, it only fueled our collective cultural infatuation (or just plain crush); if your heart didn’t skip a beat when McFly raced Dr. Emmet L. Brown’s DeLorean DMC-12 sports car back in time to 1955, you probably didn’t have a pulse.

Nobody imagined that in 1998, just a few years after starting the sitcom Spin City, he would announce he was suffering from a debilitating neurological disease. To fans, his Parkinson's came as more than just a shock; it was an emotional punch in the gut - as if a member of their own family had been handed the grimmest prognosis. But as his memoir, Lucky Man, reveals, the public hardly knew Michael J. Fox at all.

Lucky Man tells the story of Fox’s journey to become the man he is today — from his childhood in Canada, to his days living in poverty and squalor in Los Angeles before landing the part of Alex P. Keaton, to his passionate advocacy for Parkinson’s research. Most impressively, he is brave enough to reveal what we never witnessed in the years before he went public with his disease: heavy drinking, coupled with an obsessive drive to land as many roles as possible before Parkinson’s made acting impossible. It was only when he accepted his diagnosis that he could truly enjoy his life, which is why he considers himself a lucky man — not in spite of his Parkinson’s, but because of it.

His speech while narrating the book sounds a little slurred — a result of the Parkinson’s — and this makes the disease more present and real. One gets a sense of the effort he takes to tell his story, both physically and emotionally. His courage is enough to give a girl a crush all over again.