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Locked in a body like a diving bell, Jean-Dominique Bauby’s butterfly mind soared through his world, present and past, magically real and dreamlike, to select colorful scenes to land upon and rest awhile. Offering meditations on a world irrevocably altered, the pages open unto the reader like flowers, small, fragrant, and bright. Bauby’s post-stroke memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was composed to completion in his mind before it was delivered through blinks (his eyelid the only muscle in his body not paralyzed) to paper via his nurse transcriptionist, Claude Mendibil. The sections are thus short, episodic rather than chronological, and they are economically packaged with nothing forgettable, nothing throwaway, nothing excess. The cost of each word having been so high, Bauby rendered his chapters as thick and rich as fudge.

In particular, Bauby succeeds with heartbreaking descriptions of food. Unable to eat anything that cannot be passed through a feeding tube, such as several bags of caloric brown fluid a day, he turns instead “to the vivid memory of tastes and smells,” which proves to be “an inexhaustible reservoir of sensations.” He calls this practice “the art of simmering memories” (36). Friends send him recipes for dishes to cook up and enjoy with his imagination. Andouillette de Troyes with three different kinds of meat braided in strips for his “imaginary larder.” The practice of imagining both the preparation and the consumption of treasured meals past is a wonderful exercise for the writer, but I surmise it’s the deprivation, the memory-as-survival aspect of Bauby’s unique situation that make his knobby Lyons rosettes and late-vintage golden Gewurztraminer more literarily savory than anything I have tasted.

Other passages made more vivid by his salvific imagination are those in which he portrays his interactions, which in reality are limited by his inability to speak or move, as fantasy. In the chapter “The Empress,” Bauby visits a stained-glass window with the hospital’s patroness, France’s late Empress Eugénie and, without altering the reality or detail of the scene, she comes out of her window, and Bauby out of his diving bell, and together they stroll.

I followed her hat with its yellow ribbons, her silk parasol, and the scent of her passage, imbued with the eau de cologne of the court perfumer. On one particularly windy day, I even dared to draw near and bury my face in the folds of her white gauzy dress with its broad satin stripes. It was as sweet as whipped cream, as cool as the morning dew. She did not send me away. She ran her fingers through my hair and said gently, “There, there, my child, you must be very patient” (24).

Eventually, Eugénie and Bauby share an ironic laugh at the “heaping up of calamities” that have left Bauby “exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish” (25). Bauby is so grateful for their exchange he says he would have asked her to dance if it had been appropriate. That he neglects to acknowledge it would not only be inappropriate but impossible is lovely, and, for him, quite true.

Sequences of fantasy are, to those imprisoned, so necessary they cannot remain at a distance in the form of wishes or hopes—fantasy, for Bauby, must be his reality—the magical must replace what has been lost. When his haunting dreams conform too perfectly with reality, as they do in “The Dream,” he transports while awake. Through these fantasies, these simmering memories, is he able to reclaim some sense of “normalcy” within his diving bell. They are his assurance that his life has not ended, nor does it merit ending.

Interesting, also, a later chapter “At the Wax Museum” in which Bauby describes a dream he had of walking through Paris’s Musée Grévin. The museum exhibits were exactly like his hospital ward, rife with waxen figures of the doctors and nurses, each frozen in an expression or in an action that exemplifies their character to Bauby: “gentle, rough, caring, indifferent, hard-working, lazy, the ones you can make contact with and those to whom you are just another patient” (110). In his dream, it was everything else and everyone else that was frozen, locked-in. Only he was privileged to navigate the wards like a butterfly.

Throughout the memoir, Bauby demonstrates how his mind has the power to both enliven and to silence; how imagination is both an exercise of control and of abandon. Imagination was one of Bauby’s only remaining vehicles for human experience and yet the world seen through his mind, a screen like a kaleidoscope of backlit butterfly wings, seems to me more startling and real and precious—more simmering and savory— than the one I know.