David Bereson is a writer like no other. He deserves recognition

Writer David Bereson, a close friend of Phillip Adams.

I have never met David Bereson. We have never spoken. I hadn’t seen even a photograph of him. And yet we’re close friends. I know him very well. Because of his remarkable writings.

David has been sending me fragments of his prose for some years now. Sometimes one or two emails a day, sometimes weeks apart –whenever he’s back in hospital, there are extended silences. David, fighting his personal Goliath of disability, writes with such raw passion and urgency that it overwhelms the conventional constraints of grammar and spelling. Punctuation? Wildly erratic. He doesn’t so much write as erupt. So I respond with tidy-up suggestions. But in my efforts at editing I’ve never corrected his content, his “tales from the depths”.

I met David remotely, via Dr Rebecca Adams, my first-born daughter, a psychiatrist now practising in Melbourne after stints in NYC and Perth. He is Rebecca’s friend, not her patient. She too marvelled at his writings, seeing them not merely as therapeutic for David but potentially for anyone who reads them. We are privileged to share David’s utter honesty in observations on love, on friendship, on life, on death and on disability in his new memoir Dig Deep: Tales From the Depths (Franklin Street Press).

While David truly speaks to the human condition, his writings are not bleak. Despite his profound problems he is undaunted, forever hopeful and frequently very funny. I wholeheartedly commend his writing to you. As I turn the pages I find paragraphs on every imaginable and unimaginable topic. For example…Pizza, Rabbi, Lost and Found, the Piano, Heart Attack, A Birthday, The Teacher, The Drug Addict, Anzac Day, The Future of Life, The Train Trip, Bang – The Accident, Brave New World, Near Life Experience, The Doctor Won’t See You Now, The Drink of Life, Body Image, The Longest Journey, The Cone of Silence, Isolation, All Is Not Lost, Thanks NDIS, The Dreamtime, Bookshops, My Brain, Life’s Perpetual Challenge, Am I Valuable?, Covid Coffee, Cake Shops, The Doughnut, Hebrew. Dozens and dozens of mini-titles that read like blank verse.

But let David speak for himself. “When writing I think of myself as an open window ... I hope that readers find it contributes value to the way in which they confront the complexities of their own lives. My book is rather simple – the perspectives of an educated man modified by his life experiences in all its dimensions…

“Over the years many people have said to me, ‘David, you should write your story.’ My instinctive response has been, ‘Why bother? I am nothing special’.”

But, of course, David is special. When he writes “from the depths” it is not from the depths of despair but from the depths of his experience. His disabilities came suddenly – in a terrible accident – whereas disabilities usually come in increments. In my case, one by one, my senses dimmed. First my hearing, now my sight. So, increasingly, I empathise with David Bereson and admire his hard-won wisdom. I invite you to enter his world. For all his problems, for all his ‘issues’, it can be a magical place.

And you can find it on Amazon.