Michael JFox: ‘My optimism is suddenly finite’

The fantastic Mr Fox, diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1991, faced his worst year yet in 2018, he reveals in a new memoir.

Michael J Fox pictured in 2012. Picture: Michael Dwyer/AP

The Queen had her annus horribilis in 1992, Michael J Fox reminds us in his bracingly honest new book about the worst year of his life, No Time Like the Future.

His equivalent nadir, and the reason he felt inspired to write this third memoir, was 2018. That, you think, must have been a bad year indeed for a man who had been living with Parkinson’s disease since his diagnosis in 1991, when he was 29. In 2018, however, doctors found a tumour on his spine that required “high-risk surgery” or he would end up paralysed.

Just as he was slowly recovering from that, he fell in his home in Manhattan and broke his arm.

The broken arm wasn’t exactly the straw on the camel’s back — it required a steel plate and 19 pins — but it was the thing that put the severest dent in the optimism that had, until that point, been Fox’s forte. With his Michael J Fox Foundation he had raised more than $US1bn ($A1.37bn) for research into Parkinson’s disease.

And, after retiring at the age of 40 at the start of the century, when he decided the Parkinson’s was limiting his performances too much, he had gradually returned to a series of guest roles on television. He wasn’t back to the leading-man heyday of Back to the Future or 90s sitcom Spin City, but he had an outlet for his talent. (Watch one of his 26 guest turns on legal drama The Good Wife, as a scheming lawyer playing on his disability, to be reminded how magnetic a performer he remained.)

“As an actor,” he writes, “here’s how I see myself: I can portray any human being, and some animals, so long as they have Parkinson’s disease.”

No Time Like the Future is a memoir with an unusual sense of purpose, because it’s a book about Fox trying to figure out what his own sense of purpose is. And he writes it in a pithy, highly readable, present-tense bestsellerese. Nobody could read it without ending up with the utmost respect for Fox’s fortitude and a palpable sense of the love between him and his wife and family.

He puts us into the heart of what it’s like to live with this disability, where every movement is a challenge. And this is the former fresh-faced Canadian kid who was forever running, playing sports, testing and enjoying his body. What kind of cruel and random universe would dish him a “movement disorder”, so young?

Fox doesn’t waste time arguing the toss. In the 10 years after his Parkinson’s diagnosis, he and his wife, Tracy, expand their family from one child to four. He gives up the booze. And alongside tales of glamorous-sounding family holidays (Turks and Caicos Islands, African safari) offset by less-than-glamorous physical challenges, Fox is wonderfully lucid as he explains exactly how Parkinson’s manifests itself.

“Mine is not a mental order or an emotional one, although these issues can develop. It is neurological, and manifests in a corruption of movement.” Yes, he says, he has some tremors, “a slight palsy”. More important, though, is “the diminishment of movement. Absent a chemical intervention, Parkinson’s will render me frozen, immobile, stone-faced and mute — entirely at the mercy of my environment. For someone for whom motion equals emotion, vibrancy and relevance, it’s a lesson in humility.”

There is, alas, more humility to come. He has to go through a long and hazardous operation on his spine; he goes through mood swings after two days under anaesthetic; he has to learn to walk again. Then, underestimating his fragility as he skips into the kitchen, he breaks his arm. “My optimism,” he says, “is suddenly finite.”

Fox tells his story vividly, with plenty of quips and self-deprecation. The most compelling moments, though, are when he questions his can-do spirit; when he asks at what point positivity becomes self-deception.

“In telling other patients, ‘Chin up! It will be OK!’, did I look to them to validate my optimism? Is it because I needed to believe it myself? Things don’t always turn out. Sometimes things turn shitty. I have to tell people the whole deal.” Now 59, Fox has retired for the second time. The physical challenges have long been large, but now his memory isn’t what it was and nor is his control of his speech. “If this is the end of my acting career, so be it.”

Fox knows what he has to be thankful for, knows what he has achieved, so his humility doesn’t feel faux. And it’s all the more moving when he ends up by putting his personal issues in the context of the whole world’s annus horribilis in 2020. “As impossible as it is to imagine, there are fragments of hope in the wreckage, as well as things to be grateful for.” That is an actor and campaigner who knows whereof he speaks.

THE TIMES

No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality, by Michael J Fox (Hachette, $32.99)