Contemporary Authors

• The Brand New Catastrophe Sarabande (Louisville, KY), 2017

1. The brand new catastrophe LCCN 2016014119 Type of material Book Personal name Scalise, Mike, author. Main title The brand new catastrophe / Mike Scalise. Published/Produced Louisville, Ky : Sarabande Books, 2017. Projected pub date 1701 Description pages cm ISBN 9781941411339 (paperback) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available.

• Literary Hub - http://lithub.com/mike-scalise-on-his-rare-condition-and-the-illness-memoir/

  VIA SARABANDE
  MIKE SCALISE ON HIS RARE CONDITION
  AND THE ILLNESS MEMOIR
  AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR OF THE BRAND NEW CATASTROPHE

  February 3, 2017 By Andrew Cartwright
  Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)179Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)More

  On the surface, The Brand New Catastrophe by debut memoirist Mike Scalise is a book about a rare medical condition called acromegaly, a hormone disorder caused when a brain tumor grows in the pituitary gland. Acromegaly exists just outside the periphery of our collective cultural knowledge. Among the populace, mention of the illness might invoke some vague association with the icon, Andre the Giant—the most famous acromegalic—though it is far more likely to draw blank stares. The scattered books and documentaries about the subject tend to focus on the novelty of this rare condition; since untreated acromegaly can cause facial and bodily deformities, in Hollywood, acromegalics have sometimes been cast in fantasy and horror movies, as lovable monsters—or more often, as villains.

  For his part, Scalise, whose acromegaly was caught early in life, at age 24 when a tumor burst in his head, doesn’t ignore Andre or the other historical associations with the condition. But he doesn’t stop there to gawk either. Rather, The Brand New Catastrophe reveals the human experience of acromegaly with a beautiful and skillful clarity, rendering the rare and misunderstood disorder with an intimate, personal grace.

  In the book, Scalise deftly and compellingly captures his struggle—that of a “busted” man searching out a new normal—with a defiant emotional candor, a generous spirit, and an utterly infectious sense of humor, amidst gut-punch moments of pain, anger, exhaustion and heartache over living within a body that has betrayed itself. From start to finish, The Brand New Catastrophe is full of masterful writing that both enacts and transcends the illness memoir genre, exploring what it means to be a son and husband; an artist; a friend; a man; and yes, an acromegalic in the first two decades of the 21st century.

  Scalise currently lives with his wife in Brooklyn where he writes and works for a DC-based non-profit. I spoke with him from his home, via Skype.

  ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

  Andrew Cartwright: Your book won the Doheny Prize from the Center for Fiction, awarded to outstanding fiction or nonfiction that deals with physical illness. When you set out to write the story of your experience with acromegaly, how conscious were you of entering into an “illness memoir” conversation?

  Mike Scalise: I was really conscious of the illness memoir aspect of it because at first I was really reluctant as a memoirist. I tried a couple different avenues with this story that were a little more journalistically-driven, to tell the larger story of some of the more famous acromegalics like Andre the Giant, Tony Robbins, Gheorghe Muresan, Rondo Hatton and others. But I quickly found that, in order to access their stories in the way that I wanted to, I had to put myself at the middle. This was a long trial-and-error process for me, but when I got there, I knew that it needed to be an illness memoir, and I knew that I needed to take the genre seriously.

  AC: So, did you read any other books within the genre leading up to writing your book?

  MS: Yeah. I really responded to a number of really well-known illness memoirs. Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face obviously was really interesting to me, and then Philip Roth’s Patrimony, which is a book about his father’s diagnosis with a brain tumor that kind of weaves around in a strange way and has moments that range from heartbreaking to hilarious. I read it and I was like, Oh, you can do this?

  AC: I think your book does that well, too.

  MS: Thanks, man. It was all about finding a series of memoirs that gave me permission. Another one was Donald Antrim’s The Afterlife, which again has a non-traditional memoir structure that talks about his relationship to his mother in a way that really resonated with me. The other one that was really key for me was Deb Olin Unferth’s Revolution which didn’t have a lot of overlap with me with regards to subject matter, but I did find her structure and her voice and the way that she managed a timeline to be really helpful for me writing. So, when it came to memoirs, I had to develop a familiarity with the genre and then a second familiarity with what within that genre really energized me to write. Early on, with this particular book, it became a situation where, no matter how much I tried to not write personally—every time I would try to sit down and craft a journalistic narrative about say, Andre the Giant—the personal wouldn’t get out of my way. It was really frustrating. And so at some point, I just said, Alright, well, we’re going to tackle this and see what happens. Once I figured out was the only way to write through the personal stuff, I knew I needed to prepare otherwise.

  AC: Let’s talk about Andre a little bit, if you don’t mind. So, he had a condition called gigantism, which is related to acromegaly, but it’s like child-onset acromegaly, is that correct?

  MS: Yeah, it’s the exact same condition, just with a different name. It happens earlier before someone’s bone cartilage has a chance to mature, so that’s why it expands them.

  AC: Okay. It seems like Andre kind of ghosts this piece, appearing from time to time, sometimes just as a figure of interest but other times as a foil of sorts to what you, as the narrator, hope to be and do with this condition you both have shared. First off, what did you learn from the research process looking at Andre and his life?

  MS: I mean, I’m still kind of learning. Andre Rousimoff, I think, was somebody who led a couple different lives: one he had a lot of control over that we didn’t get to see; one he had no control over that we all got to see which lived well past him in many different ways; and one in the middle which he seemed to sort of manipulate people with, his public wrestler persona. I think he was a really savvy person about how people were looking at him and what he could do with it. So, what I learned from him that was really unexpected, was that you can be in control. You may not have control over what a condition has secretly done to your body. But you can control what you do with that information, who you give it to, how you present it, and how you teach people to react to your condition.

  AC: There did seem to be some angst directed at the figure of Andre, however, say in the scene from the book where you are looking in the mirror, kind of wondering and worrying, Do I see Andre in my own face?

  MS: That anger isn’t so much at Andre or what he meant, but more at the fact that you just kind of find out one day that your endocrine system has betrayed you and has betrayed you for many years, in ways that you think you trust yourself to notice, but you can’t. It’s a nebulous anger and it doesn’t really have any direction. But, when you learn of this condition, you learn that you inherit this complicated history of people who aren’t, on their face, very well regarded by the culture. You know, Andre is a really famous person that seems to have engendered a lot of affection from people, but Rondo Hatton hasn’t, Eddie Carmel hasn’t. So, you start to ask yourself, what does it mean to be among these other people who have this condition. And it can be really frustrating at first. But eventually, you know, they’re just people. And hopefully the book starts a little bit of a conversation about what kind of people they are and how to look past that.

  AC: Absolutely. How much did you know about acromegaly before the “explosion” in your head?

  MS: Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I didn’t even know it was a thing. It was all brand new to me. In a sense, that was great from a writing standpoint because you’re a stranger in a strange land. But, for a while, I didn’t want to know anything. I didn’t want the information. Because I hadn’t chosen any of that, and it didn’t match with the image that I had in my mind, or what I envisioned for my future. So, it took a long time for me to begin to see myself as part of that family. And I do have to say, I only had acromegaly for a year and a half. There are people who’ve had it for much longer than me who this experience is far different for. I was diagnosed at 24 but most people are diagnosed at 50 after many, many years. And that experience I don’t want to speak for. For me, yeah, it was a rough transition, mentally and physically, just really difficult.

  AC: There are a lot of really impressively accessible medical passages here that describe the illness in an understandable way, which seems like a tough thing to do. If I were to write about acromegaly, for example, I wouldn’t know where to start beyond just the basic description—It’s a pituitary condition . . . Andre had it . . . —but you capture it well. How much of that fluency or fluidity comes from your personal experience?

  MS: You know, that kind of writing wasn’t actually a natural fit for me, either. It was something I really had to work at. There’s a type of nonfiction writer that I’ve always deeply admired, but could never emulate, who seems to have an enthusiasm for the information, enthusiasm for the idea of information and the stories it can tell, the possibilities of it; there’s an engine behind the writing about that information that is really attractive. Mary Roach, for instance, is somebody who really just kind of has a verve for whatever story the information presents. She’s able to filter it through her own sensibility in a way that’s really palatable to the reader. However, I really struggled whenever I would try to write these research-heavy passages until I started to realize that it wasn’t necessarily important for me to be a scholar, it was important for me to see the information as rhetoric. You can use what’s in that research in a way that empowers your own sensibility and then leave the rest.

  AC: What’s next for you? I know that this book is just releasing so you have a lot of work left to do, reading engagements and other promotions with Sarabande, but what else are you working on?

  MS: The projects that I was working on in the years that Brand New Catastrophe was finding a publisher were more fiction-based, and I’m really looking forward to getting back to those. The one thing about having an illness and finding yourself compelled to write about it is that I had an idea of what I wanted to write before all of this. Then this illness happened and it put itself in front of me in a way that forced me to contend with it. I do feel lucky that this story that has given me a clean break—I don’t have anything else to say about it; the tap is empty.

  AC: So, by nature, it’s something you’ve kind of written out of yourself, and now it’s time to move on to something else.

  MS: Yeah. Now I’m really looking forward to doing the kind of work that I really wanted to do before this happened. It’s a really exciting graduation point.

  AcromegalyAndre the GiantAndrew Cartwrightdisabilityillnessillness memoirsinterviewsMike ScalisepartnersSarabandeThe Brand New Catastrophe

  Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)179Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)More

  Andrew Cartwright
  Andrew Cartwright

  Andrew Cartwright writes and studies creative nonfiction in the MFA program at George Mason University in Virginia, where he also works for the journals, Phoebe and So To Speak. His work has appeared in Esquire Ukraine and Word Riot.

• BOMB Magazine - http://bombmagazine.org/article/3959322/belle-boggs-mike-scalise

  March 24, 2017
  Belle Boggs & Mike Scalise
  "The perceived aversion to a male-centered illness narrative had to do with antiquated ideas about who should and shouldn't be vulnerable to a failing body, and what that vulnerability means."

  I've known Belle Boggs for years, first as a teacher then as a wonderful fiction writer, and in 2012 our respective forays into memoir coincided—both of us pulled to personal stories by events that overtook our ability to clearly process much else, in our writing lives or elsewhere. For Belle, it was the journey of childbirth, or, more accurately, natural childbearing alternatives and the evolving influence of birth culture, which she channeled into the sprawling, hopeful, and moving book The Art of Waiting (Graywolf Press, 2016).

  My book, The Brand New Catastrophe (Sarabande, January 2017), details a health disaster in my early twenties with acromegaly. The illness first amplified, then destroyed, my body's ability to produce hormones. Belle and I both embarked on stories about our bodies betraying their nature, and I thought often of her while writing my own, wondering what mysteries she'd uncovered. We'd both been turned into bloodhounds searching for our bodies' true purposes, and it was surprising, with our respective cases closed, to compare notes on what we solved, and what we didn't.

  — Mike Scalise

  Belle Boggs I loved The Brand New Catastrophe, not just for your honest (and often hilarious) depiction of the experience of illness but also for the beautiful, nuanced portraits of your family and friends and of course, Loren. Can you talk about the path The Brand New Catastrophe took to publication, how the book evolved and found its home at Sarabande?

  Mike Scalise Oh man, it was rough. There are folds of real human drama in this story—near misses, conniptions, Kafkaesque machinations, and somehow both my editor and my agent got hit by cars at some point (though not the same car). But I'll keep to the emotionally-in-control version. After about two years of work, I finalized a draft in late 2012. I felt like I'd written something that would find a good home. A year later, we had zero takers. Reasons ranged from marketability concerns to the anecdotal structure, and in at least one puzzling case, a perceived aversion to "male illness memoir." So my agent and I shelved the thing, which utterly wrecked me in the way breakups do. I moved on to other projects for about a year and a half, and sent the memoir out to contests, with very few revisions or expectations. Then in 2015, it won one, and a few months later found its way to Sarabande, who saw something in it and took great care of the book, which I'm happy to say I found a way to love again, however cautiously.

  I feel like we have similar timeframes. What was the story of The Art of Waiting? Hoping no auto collisions…

  BB No collisions—well, my car did get crushed by a falling tree limb (in the same storm that took out the tree I'd watched a bald eagle pair nest in for years)—but I wasn't in the car, and the eagles actually rebuilt their nest nearby, so everything was cool.

  I didn't know I was writing a book when I started—I thought I was writing a couple of individual essays, but each piece made me curious about something else, so I kept writing. About a year later I was working on a long nonfiction piece (about eugenics-based sterilization in North Carolina), and I realized that I wanted to do something longer that also included the stories of other people. So I wrote a proposal. Finishing the book took a while for a variety of reasons. But my first book, Mattaponi Queen, has a very similar story to The Brand New Catastrophe—it came to publication through a contest, after I'd just about given up on it, and that good fortune changed my life. I'm so thankful for indie presses like Graywolf and Sarabande for taking risks on story collections, essay collections, and male illness narratives.

  MS My god, yes. Love to contests too.

  BB It's really interesting that there would be an aversion to a "male illness memoir"—it seems like men, at least in my life, experience illness as much as (or more than) the women. But taking infertility as an example, it's much less common to see men writing or speaking out. Infertility is usually seen as a woman's problem, even though it's just as often an issue for men. I guess there's a natural reticence to talk about the ways our own bodies fail us, especially when the failings connect to hormones, reproduction, sex, identity.

  MS Right! I hesitate to oversell that line of critique because it wasn't something we saw all the time, and I don't want to suggest that my experience was even close to on par with the deep gender disparities women experience in publishing/everywhere on the planet. But I suspect the perceived aversion to a male-centered illness narrative—just in this case—had to do with antiquated ideas about who should and shouldn't be vulnerable to a failing body, and what that vulnerability means, especially when you get into the reproduction and sex stuff. Or, just as likely, it was a way to say, "I don't know what to do with this book," which points to a larger duality of living with illness that I've long been acquainted with. Not only do you have to determine how to be sick for yourself, but you also have to learn to be sick for non-sick people too, in ways that allow them to feel safe and unchallenged by it.

  BB You write so candidly about your own experience of acromegaly, the history of that disease and the sneaky way it affects people, changing their appearance little by little, often without their awareness (until a catastrophe, like an exploding brain tumor, announces itself). Your mother recognizes your disease before anyone else, and spends a holiday weekend puzzling over what's wrong. "Your. Face. Does. Not. Look. Right." You write about having a gradually-changed appearance, and the sudden need to take a lot of daily medication. You also write about the experience of illness as performance, and a set of rules for handling—wrangling?—catastrophe. The combination of these elements—the unusual male illness narrative, the role-playing and rule-creation—makes for a story that I hadn't read before, and works both as a catastrophe primer and probably as a kind of balm for people who have gone through this kind of medical-surgical odyssey. Were you trying to write something that would have helped you? Prepared you? Did you have a sense, as you were writing, that the story was unusual not just because of acromegaly, but through its telling?

  MS I hadn't thought of those "how to" interludes in terms of my former self before, but yeah, that makes so much sense. They're such pathos-driven attempts by a very young person to wrestle back control over a situation that had claimed all of it. The "how to" portions were meant to give an overarching perspective to that story, which felt so overwhelming and confusing to write about at first. I'd read all these great, bedrock memoirs in the mode of Stop-Time or Speak, Memory that infuse perspective by dramatizing the act of remembering, usually in present-tense, all-italic chapters set with the author in his late fifties, either half-drunk at a typewriter or staring out a window at dusk. I love those books, but I couldn't make that approach work, partly because I began writing about the experience only about six years after my diagnosis at age twenty-four. I didn't have the distance or maturity to pull that off. So I went back to my earliest writing about the tumor, which was, of course, awful. But I was surprised at how much it crackled with this dumb confidence about how to game the system of having a rare illness—to "make it work for you"—that I just didn't have anymore. So I thought, what if the memoir becomes a book-long interrogation of that confidence and what had to happen to it?

  There's a fantastic bit of this kind of work in The Art of Waiting, where you return to the sensibilities of a few characters you developed while writing Mattaponi Queen. I love how it gets the heart of how unfair notions of entitlement persist about those who seek IVF in a manner that also implicates you, which also ends up earning a reader's trust in this really effective, ingenious way that carries throughout the book. I'm curious about how you balanced that interrogation so well without slipping too far into self-laceration. How did you keep it useful to a reader?

  BB A common experience for infertile people, I think, is that they've encountered some narratives about infertility and assisted reproduction before they knew they were infertile. And maybe, like me, they had certain biases and preconceptions about the typical patient or what treatment is like. I was amazed to learn that even doctors have this bias—in one study, fewer than twenty percent of physicians correctly identified that people with lower levels of educational attainment are more likely to be infertile, or that African-American women experience infertility at higher rates than white women (white women and white babies are significantly more likely to appear in advertisements for fertility clinics). I think I came to this information after I'd already identified some of my own preconceptions, the received ideas about pursuing standard antiretroviral therapy—stereotypes about the uptight, single-minded woman pursuing pregnancy at all costs—that were present in my fiction before I even knew that I'd have problems getting pregnant.

  It's interesting how this works on a cultural level—because I was a high school teacher while I was undergoing treatment, I was interested in looking at the way fertility is portrayed in literature—but also in policy and law. What would it mean for all women if personhood advocates get their way? Why is my state-provided health care plan written to look like parts of Catholic doctrine? How are both treatment and the emotional experience of the disease different if you live in a state like North Carolina, with no mandated coverage, versus Massachusetts, where coverage is generous? What about people who don't have these resources at all, or who, for reasons of physician bias, don't get referred to reproductive endocrinologists?

  You write a lot about health care and health insurance too, and I think the fact that you narrate your own difficulties more than you comment on them makes for a really effective, subtle argument. For example, you describe a rather disastrous job interview where you basically blurt out that you need insurance, like, yesterday. Of course you don't get the job, and even though you had good medical treatment, you point out that a lot of this has to do with luck and the fact that your disease is so unusual. Unfortunately, we're in a whole new uncertain, and likely very terrible, health care situation now—one you couldn't have foreseen, I'm guessing, when you finished the book. To me, that makes the work even more important for people to read and think about.

  MS As the book was taking its final shape, the Affordable Care Act was made law, and it occurred to me in this really hopeful, naïve way that the scenes in which I struggled with insurance—I remember it being this constant haze of very loud fear—would be relics of a more cruel time where our system let sick people wither on the vine. I'm not happy in any way that those parts of the book are relevant again. I benefitted from luck and privilege during those years in a way that many don't. Part of that had to do precisely with my age and how it coupled with my rare conditions, which made me an attractive patient file that doctors, at times, were willing to cut corners for. Now that I'm in my late thirties, I doubt I'll get those same benefits should I lose my job and coverage, so I'm starting to feel that fear simmer once more. It's very demoralizing to have to begin disaster planning for my own body in this way again, but here we are, for reasons I still can't understand.

  As for if I'd ever write into this space again, I truly hope not to. It's a difficult space to feel creatively energized by, and I told myself while writing it that I was on a mission to extinguish the story. It helped quite a bit, mentally, to think of it as the last and only time I'd work in memoir, and with illness. But if there's a project that commandeers my impulses again like this one did, and memoir presents itself as the only genre that fits, I guess I'd have no choice?

  BB I hope you'll have the chance to write what most compels you. Thank you again for The Brand New Catastrophe. Its title certainly fits these times, but I think reading it, strangely, is a kind of escape, because it's so funny and warm and hopeful. Onward.

  MS Onward indeed.

  Mike Scalise is the author of the memoir The Brand New Catastrophe, a recipient of the Christopher Doheny Award from the Center for Fiction. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Agni, Indiewire, Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf, Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, and was the Philip Roth Writer in Residence at Bucknell University. He lives in New York.

  Belle Boggs is the author of The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood and the story collection Mattaponi Queen.The Art of Waiting is a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and was chosen as a best book of 2016 by O the Oprah Magazine, Buzzfeed Books, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and the Globe and Mail. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in North Carolina and teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

  Tags: memoir health care publishing illness childbirth

• Sarabande Books - http://www.sarabandebooks.org/all-titles/a-brand-new-catastrophe-mike-scalise

  Mike Scalise’s work has appeared in Agni, Indiewire, Ninth Letter, The Paris Review, Wall Street Journal, and other places. He’s an 826DC advisory board member, has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and the Ucross Foundation, and was the Philip Roth Writer in Residence at Bucknell University. His memoir, The Brand New Catastrophe, was the recipient of The Center for Fiction's 2014 Christopher Doheny Award.

5/31/2017 General OneFile ­ Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1496267397355 1/3
Print Marked Items
Scalise, Mike: THE BRAND NEW
CATASTROPHE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Scalise, Mike THE BRAND NEW CATASTROPHE Sarabande (Adult Nonfiction) $15.95 1, 31 ISBN: 978­1­941411­
33­9
A devastating diagnosis throws a writer and his family into a tailspin.The crushing catastrophe at the core of Scalise's
memoir is a burst pituitary tumor that occurred in 2002, when the author was just 24. The author enlivens his anecdotedriven
chronicle with dispatches involving his mother, a worrisome matriarch who smokes and drinks despite a
congenital heart ailment; his father, who emails pornography to him in a postoperative attempt to jump­start depleted
testosterone levels; and his understanding, compassionate longtime girlfriend, Loren. Scalise's tumor, seated behind his
eyes, released an increased amount of pituitary hormones into his bloodstream, which can lead to a rare condition
called acromegaly, causing facial and body gigantism. In a chapter titled "Q&A," the author discusses the protocol
used by physicians to assess him for symptoms, intimately detailing the numerous adverse side effects he subsequently
endured throughout the months following his neurosurgery. Excessive sweating, nerve damage, sleep deprivation­­all
pointed to a positive diagnosis and more agony for Scalise and his family. The author's quirky sense of humor and
crisp, hopeful worldview transform this memoir from dreary to fascinating and engaging even after the grueling
particulars of his Gamma Knife cranial radiation procedures are laid bare. Adding substance to the story is the medical
history of how acromegaly has altered the appearances of notable public figures like Andre the Giant, Tony Robbins,
and Olympic skater Scott Hamilton. Combined with his thoughtful meditations on the nature of life's randomly
occurring catastrophes, readers are further drawn into the author's story. There is no silver lining here, but Scalise's
narrative verve and brisk prose create a winning chronicle of illness, recovery, and "courageous defiance." A frankly
written debut memoir that captures all the fright of a medical calamity and the humor and grace necessary to survive it.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Scalise, Mike: THE BRAND NEW CATASTROPHE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471901816&it=r&asid=8cb6bb97dbfa5b69a924720f49bd0d8a.
Accessed 31 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471901816
5/31/2017 General OneFile ­ Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1496267397355 2/3
The Brand New Catastrophe
Tony Miksanek
Booklist.
113.8 (Dec. 15, 2016): p11.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Brand New Catastrophe.
By Mike Scalise.
Jan. 2017. 260p. Sarabande, paper, $15.95 (97819414113391.613.
In 2002, a presumably healthy 24­year­old man went to the emergency room with what he believed was a migraine.
Instead, Scalise's headache was a symptom of a bleeding pituitary gland tumor in the brain. He writes about his
surgery, recovery, Gamma Knife radiotherapy, injections, doctor's visits, and necessary hormone­replacement
medications (Hydro­cortisol, Synthroid, desmopressin, AndroGel). After the rupture of his pituitary tumor and
operation, he develops hypopituitarism­­the body's inability to secrete essential hormones­­a condition he dubs
"hormonelessness." Prior to the diagnosis and treatment of the tumor, he unknowingly had acromegaly, an endocrine
disorder of excess human growth hormone. Lurch of TV's The Addams Family, Jaws in James Bond movies, and
wrestler Andre the Giant also had acromegaly. Scalise handles his calamity with a weird sense of humor and often
nonchalance. Along the way, he gets married, works a number of different jobs, and has frequent interactions with his
eccentric parents. The effect of illness on self­image and its gravitational pull on family, friends, and spouse are
touchingly detailed in this upbeat health memoir.­­Tony Miksanek
Miksanek, Tony
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Miksanek, Tony. "The Brand New Catastrophe." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 11. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476563412&it=r&asid=eb160d46f9e79f8c56609bca27ef3b23.
Accessed 31 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476563412
5/31/2017 General OneFile ­ Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1496267397355 3/3
The Brand New Catastrophe: A Memoir
Publishers Weekly.
263.41 (Oct. 10, 2016): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Brand New Catastrophe: A Memoir
Mike Scalise. Sarabande, $15.95 trade paper (304p) ISBN 978­1­941411­33­9
Scalise, who has written for the Paris Review and Agni, delivers an offbeat, witty memoir about his life after
discovering that he has a brain tumor related to acromegaly, a hormone disorder that causes gigantism. Scalise is
unsparing in recounting his reaction to his diagnosis ("You learn at once that you've been placed on a very particular
spectrum of ugly") while keeping the reader engaged in a story about catastrophe: "Focus on the oddities and ironies
that would seem incredible and ridiculous in any context, not just that of your disaster." In between descriptions of his
various hospital visits and operation, he presents how his illness affected his relationships with his "universe of loved
ones, friends and acquaintances, all pulled into a troubled orbit around the busted person at its core." The most
memorable characters are his girlfriend, who helps him deal with tumor­related testosterone issues, and his mother,
who suffers her own chronic cardiac problems. He also looks at acromegaly in a broader social context, such as how it
affected a number of Hollywood actors including Andre the Giant. But the heart of Scalise's sensitive and well­written
memoir is his depiction of how he dealt with his illness personally, especially the "complicated role­play" of
"becoming infatuated with your own defense mechanisms." (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Brand New Catastrophe: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016, p. 66. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466616192&it=r&asid=d5af52db3254906c967613c5fb8f34f0.
Accessed 31 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466616192

"Scalise, Mike: THE BRAND NEW CATASTROPHE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471901816&it=r. Accessed 31 May 2017. Miksanek, Tony. "The Brand New Catastrophe." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 11. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476563412&it=r. Accessed 31 May 2017. "The Brand New Catastrophe: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016, p. 66. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466616192&it=r. Accessed 31 May 2017.

• Phoebe Journal
  http://www.phoebejournal.com/book-review-the-brand-new/
  Word count: 997

  Book Review: The Brand New Catastrophe
  The Brand New Catastrophe
  Mike Scalise
  Sarabande Books, 2017
  260 pp.

  The writer who chooses memoir as a medium faces a daunting challenge: to ground himself in the personal—in a specific, unique, individual life—and somehow open back out into the world of larger human experience, where readers live.

  For the writers of an illness memoir, the challenge is further compounded.

  For one, the experience of being seriously ill rarely comes with an in-built sense of perspective. In fact, illness often seems to actively resist perspective, if not destroy it, knocking the body out of sync with its normal rhythm, exhausting the cognitive properties necessary for description and understanding.

  On top of that, serious illness can act as a barrier between those who have experienced it and those who have not. As Elaine Scarry writes in The Body in Pain, “When one hears about another person’s pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography.”

  A writer with a serious illness, wishing to convey the truth of his lived experience, cannot avoid the bodily reality of that illness, or its effect on his life; neither can they readily express the pain of that experience to another person. Though the illness may loom conspicuously large in the life of the writer, the experience does not easily translate; in the mind of a reader, the writer’s pain might as well exist in another dimension, another universe.

  In his debut memoir, The Brand New Catastrophe—out now from Sarabande Press—Mike Scalise acknowledges these challenges of inexpressibility and faces them head on with verve and energy, honesty and empathy, a knack for quick in-depth description and an irrepressible, self-aware sense of humor. In one beautiful and poignant passage, for example, Scalise describes the breaks and separations caused by the onset of illness, as well as the drive to reassert some sort of control in the face of bodily chaos and uncertainty:

  You inherit a new, small universe with every catastrophe. But when the catastrophe is illness, it’s your universe to steward, and it’s already half-complete by the time you get it. Diagnoses, complications, final outcomes—those are rarely yours to fully mold. So you’re appointed your illness’ middle manager, its parking lot attendant, responsible for arranging people properly in its orbit.

  For his part, Scalise is a masterful arranger, crafting a narrative that leaves the reader feeling lucky to have been positioned so skillfully. As in many of the best illness memoirs, Scalise overcomes the odds stacked against him—not the least of which is that the majority of readers may not have ever even heard of his particular disorder—through an incredible driving desire to share his experience, to try to understand it and learn from it alongside his readers.

  The Brand New Catastrophe is ostensibly about Scalise’s experience with acromegaly, an incredibly rare hormonal disorder—shared in one form with Andre “The Giant” Roussimoff, he of pro wrestling, Princess Bride, and propaganda fame (OBEY)—in which a tumor on the pituitary gland releases constant streams of HGH into the body. Undiscovered and untreated, acromegaly can cause a host of complications, including bone thickening which often leads to physical deformities. Acromegaly is usually discovered in late adulthood, but Scalise’s acromegaly was diagnosed early, at age 24, when a tumor unexpectedly burst inside his head—the titular catastrophic event which sets off Scalise’s narrative; though Scalise’s own physical features remained relatively untouched, he was left with a body unable to produce hormones in the fallout.

  If The Brand New Catastrophe were only an illness memoir, it would still be well worth the read; Scalise’s account of the disorder—including fascinating descriptions of the medicine treating it—is simultaneously complex and accessible, altogether vivid. For instance, at one point he describes the sensation of having excess spinal fluid released by nurses as being “like letting loose a soul-deep sneeze.” In another passage, his heartbeat becomes “a tightened metronome, a foreign, rapid glug.” Throughout, Scalise paints an impossible-to-comprehend experience with a steady brush, in strokes both hilarious and heartbreaking, beautiful and grotesque, defiant and humble, angry at times but always unfailingly generous.

  It seems that he comes by the latter trait honestly: Scalise’s intimate personal account is full of deep, colorful characters, including Scalise’s patient friends and family. The Brand New Catastrophe may be situated squarely within the realm of illness memoir, but it is also very much the story of a family, of a son trying to understand his mother’s own incomprehensible experience with chronic heart disease, of a husband struggling along with his wife to find a new normal in a world now full of uncertain experimental treatments and fake hormone injections. Scalise’s relationships with those closest to him provide access to the warm human core of a narrative that could easily have been bitter and cold; as a reader, that access is a welcome gift.

  In the end, The Brand New Catastrophe is a stunning, unforgettable memoir; a masterfully intimate and honest portrayal of a writer who has fought hard for perspective amidst the shattering impact of illness, struggling for self-definition and control in the face of chaos. Above all, it is the work of a writer deeply concerned with connecting to his readers and deftly bridging the significant gap that illness places between them, with humor, humility, and grace.

  Andrew Cartwright is a nonfiction editor for phoebe. He writes and studies creative nonfiction in the MFA program at George Mason University in Virginia. His work has appeared in Esquire Ukraine and Word Riot. Follow him on Twitter @ACart77.

• The Collagist
  http://thecollagist.com/the-collagist/2017/3/18/the-brand-new-catastrophe-by-mike-scalise.html
  Word count: 1045

  The Brand New Catastrophe
  By Mike Scalise

  Sarabande
  January 2017
  978-1941411339

  Reviewed by David Plick

  I'm writing this review about Mike Scalise’s memoir, The Brand New Catastrophe, which is all about his experiences with a rare hormonal disease called acromegaly, and his pituitary tumor that ruptured, which began a long process of recovery, but part of me doesn’t even want to talk about the disease or the tumor. Because the book is really so much more than that. It is, in that literary sense, a simple and human story, about fear, self-doubt, deep-seated family resentment that goes back generations, romantic love, and a mother-son rivalry full of mutual love, respect, and animosity. It’s a person just telling you intimate things about his experience, which in Scalise’s case, involves a rare hormonal disease and a pituitary tumor, but it really could've been about any other fill-in-the-blank personal dilemma.

  I didn't (still don't) understand the endocrine system, or its complex network of glands, how this system transmits information to the body with various hormones and even more glands, that the hormones testosterone and cortisol give males the “fight or flight” mechanism, or that hormones tell us we’re hungry or that we should take seemingly instinctive actions. I didn't know about acromegaly, or that Andre the Giant and inspirational speaker Tony Robbins have it, or that it generally makes someone very large—which sometimes, in children, results in “gigantism”—because it starts when an excess of human growth hormone (HGH) is created by the pituitary gland, which ends up destroying the pituitary’s functionality. I really know very little about diseases, even cancer, besides the fact that it killed my Aunt Marion and Uncle Otto. But you don’t have to be interested in hormones, tumors, cancer, disease, public health, the broken American healthcare system, surgery, or caretaking practices in a normal American family to absolutely adore this book. You just have to be a human who feels emotions.

  What makes The Brand New Catastrophe so beautiful is that Scalise genuinely never wants your pity, or even sympathy. If anything, he only wants to make you laugh (his biggest priority) and to tell you something honest about his fear, self-doubt, and insecurity, which have just as much to do with being a young, scared shitless writer as they do with his disease. At any moment in narrating his catastrophe story, either pre- or post-surgery, if Scalise notices that he had been feeling self-pity in the past, or some form of self-victimization, or some other maudlin feeling he now considers disingenuous, he acknowledges it. He outs himself about how he felt, about what his true intentions were in his actions. Basically, Scalise the writer is now too self aware, too real and honest, to ever want your pity. Every time he catches himself in the act, he laughs at himself. He says that he was full of shit.

  That’s not to say that Scalise doesn’t feel a wide-range of emotions post-surgery. The memoir follows him for ten years after his tumor ruptures, from his life as a freelance writer living in Brooklyn to being in his MFA program in Washington, DC, and years after, and he does transition from laughing at his disease in the beginning to living with it. He does, understandably, get sad and frustrated. In the beginning, he loves joking about it, which he says was to maintain a level of control over his illness, but at a certain point, he stops joking and talking about it with people. I laughed hysterically throughout most of the book’s beginning, which is centered around the surgery itself. But then I realized that I hadn't laughed in a while. The story, believe it or not, is actually a lot funnier when he's in the hysteria of the disease, when he could've died. Perhaps it was because at that point humor was all he had.

  This book, in general, is fall on the floor hilarious. I won't ruin it for you, but I'll give you an example. Only two weeks after his brain surgery (the doctors remove a section of his brain and fill it in with tissue from leg), Scalise decides to fly to a wedding in Ohio where he is supposed to be a groomsmen. Everyone—the bride and groom, doctors, family, his girlfriend—tells him to stay home, don't do this. But, in his dumb pride, he goes anyway. What follows—he falls down a lot and says inappropriate, far too personal things to people—is one of the funniest sections that I've ever read in any book. It was one of those cringeworthy moments, à la Curb Your Enthusiasm, where you're wincing because you’re so embarrassed for Scalise, yet you still don't pity him because he chooses to be in that position.

  The Brand New Catastrophe is beautiful because of its true sense of intimacy, because the relationships with Scalise’s family members, loved ones, and his girlfriend, are all so truthfully rendered. Throughout the book, Scalise’s mother, his “rival in catastrophe,” is going through several heart surgeries, and the bond they have is full of conflict, aggression, guilt, and anger, yet the respect and admiration they have for each other—they are both survivors, and both very strong—is inspiring.

  What else can I say except I absolutely loved this book? When Scalise first finds out that he has a pituitary tumor, the doctor says that after they remove a chunk of his brain, they have to fill it in with something else. He tells Scalise that it will come from the back of his thigh.

  "Back of my thigh," I said. "You mean my ass?"
  "Well," he said. "The back of your thigh."
  "So you mean my ass."
  "Sure, okay," he said. "But we'll likely take the fat from the side of your leg."
  "No," I said to him and then to everyone. "Take it from my ass. I want my ass in my head."

  Scalise’s nickname for himself after that: Shit for Brains.

• The Iowa Review
  https://iowareview.org/blog/mike-scalises-brand-new-catastrophe
  Word count: 746

  Mike Scalise's THE BRAND NEW CATASTROPHE
  THU, 02/23/2017 - 10:55AM
  ETHAN MADORE

  There’s a scene in Mike Scalise’s The Brand New Catastrophe where Scalise, twentysomething and struggling to find full-time work in New York City, arrives in Central Park for a job interview. In short, it’s a catastrophe. Scalise, having spent days imagining this job—and its benefits package—as his last chance, a final lifeline into honorable employment and actual health insurance, arrives sickly with nerves. Distracted by an errant German shepherd, he admits to the interviewer that he just “wants a job, any job.” She gives him the look, an expression of resigned disapproval Scalise practically majored in. Further answers are met with only a “placating menu of hmms and okays.” Desperate, he hands the interviewer a portfolio of writing: profiles of Pittsburg bands and the owners of Italian delis. “Very good,” she says, flipping through without interest. “Very nice.” The look again. And so he does it, falling back on “the only strategy that had worked in the last six months to make anyone interested in [him], about anything.”

  That is, Scalise tells the story of his illness: a litany of exploding tumors, hormonal oddities, and ironically named doctors, peppered with jokes that—just a few months out from his diagnosis—are already old to him. This is when Scalise (an acromegalic who has taken perverse delight in laying clues of his condition throughout his apartment, a man who stole and wore his hospital pajamas for months after his initial treatment) realizes that there are improper contexts for catastrophe narratives. The interviewer, feigning sympathy, or—maybe worse—expressing real pity, excuses herself as soon as possible, the promise of one kind of salvation leaving with her.

  Throughout his memoir, Scalise presents himself as a scholar of disaster narratives. He becomes “a human way station of pituitary factoids, a cataloger of stories about growth hormone and brain tumors . . . .” His is a disease of the Google age, where we treat the violence of sudden diagnosis with the balm of obsession, filling breaches in our identities with what we find with the search bar. The writer’s investigation is wide; he reaches for the early journals of acromegalics, the lore of nuclear age monster movies, the spectacle of early reality shows. It is the associative impulse desired in essay, though contained. What emerges is not the social history of a disease, but rather the portrait of a digressive narrator searching for self meaning. For Scalise, acromegaly—a cousin of gigantism—is more than a brain tumor discovered when he was only twenty-four; it’s more than his body’s refusal to produce its own hormones and his lifelong reliance on a few expensive specialists. It is the idea of alteredness: it is hours spent searching the mirror for acromegaly’s characteristic distended jaw; the specter of André the Giant’s face spray-painted across the city; the ghostly sightings of strangers he passes who, perhaps undiagnosed, bear the same recognizable traits.

  Yet, despite his careful tracking of his own illness, Scalise’s memoir is not the narrative of a catastrophe. Our setting, apart from a few initial scenes, is not the hospital; we are spared its fluorescent melodrama, its sterile call to live differently. Scalise’s acromegaly is more recognizably a strain of Seneca’s asthma or Susan Sontag’s cancer. It is a point of departure for a work that is as much about idleness, the slow progression of treatment without climax, and the ways in which we form identities that embrace, as much as resist, what inflicts us. In one sublime passage, Scalise—not beyond using his reliance on artificial hormones as an opportunity to experiment—takes himself off testosterone. What results is chillingly Zen: the contours of a life stripped of some of its fallible passions—an explication, in miniature, of an aspect of maleness that still clings to the primordial.

  Our hormones are routines; they are what is animal in us—what we rely upon and yet dismiss for the illusion control. Maybe what The Brand New Catastrophe best charts is a man’s struggle to regain routine; the temperament it requires to navigate medications; the domestication of a relationship once conceived of in opposition to the normal order; and the ways in which, in order to master life’s disruptions, we elevate them into towering ideas.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/books/review/mothers-and-sons.html
  Word count: 244

  THE BRAND NEW CATASTROPHE
  A Memoir
  By Mike Scalise
  303 pp. Sarabande, paper, $15.95.

  Photo

  Scalise receives much from his mother as well, including what he believes to be a flawed template for dealing with chronic illness. On the occasion of the first of her many heart procedures, she lashes out in “fits of despair,” the very opposite reaction Scalise has after his previously undetected brain tumor ruptures. “You just made jokes in that hospital,” she scolds him. “Had yourself a good old time.” He has acromegaly, the same growth hormone disorder as Andre the Giant. It is typically noticed in the middle-aged. Scalise is 24.

  He and his mother spend the next decade competing to be the best kind of sick, a philosophical re-enactment of the slap boxing matches they had when he was a child. (“How hard, exactly,” he’d wondered, “should one slap one’s own mother?”) The goal then had been for her to toughen him up; the goal now is for him to calm her down. “I wanted to show her a way to be sick,” Scalise explains, “other than the way she’d relied on, which drove her so sullen and stomped-on, drove us so mad with helplessness.” His way is with humor, optimism, courage and probing introspection, the very characteristics — combined with crisp prose and a rare and innately interesting medical condition — that make this a winning literary debut.

Word Count