Oliver Sacks's not quite nonfiction

Summary

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Unexplainable (Vox)

Episode: "Oliver Sacks's not quite nonfiction"

Date: March 23, 2026

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Overview

This episode of Unexplainable delves into the complex life and legacy of Oliver Sacks, famed neurologist and celebrated writer often called the "Poet Laureate of Medicine." Host Amy Padula interviews Rachel Aviv, staff writer at The New Yorker, whose recent in-depth article examined Sacks’s private archives and explored both his literary approach and deeply personal struggles. Together, they unpack how Sacks’s own life—his sexuality, therapy, loneliness, and search for love—influenced, and at times blurred with, his portrayals of patients. The central focus: the boundary between truth and art in Sacks’s writing, and what it means for science, empathy, and the expectations we place on doctor-authors.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Sacks’s Writing Style and Influence in Medical Humanities

• Sacks revolutionized how doctors write about patients by centering the inner lives and humanity of those often dismissed by medicine ([01:12]–[02:57]).
  • Rachel Aviv: “He was like almost a figurehead for medical humanities in a way...there is a human life behind all of this information.” ([01:40])
• His best-known works, Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, blurred genres—part biography, part fable, raising questions about the line between fact and literary truth.

2. Sacks’s Deeply Private Life

• Despite chronicling others’ lives in intimate detail, Sacks rarely disclosed much about his own struggles.
  • Padula notes his lifelong shyness and solitude ([05:46]).
• A previously unknown archive of diaries and correspondence revealed intense, turbulent experiences around his sexuality, loneliness, and half-century of psychoanalysis ([04:35]–[08:25]).
  • Aviv describes reading letters detailing Sacks’s "whirlwind romance" with a man in Berlin, followed by bitter heartbreak and years of celibacy:
    • Rachel Aviv: “My blood is like champagne.” ([07:38])—a line from Sacks to his lover, showing a rare moment of happiness.
    • After heartbreak: “...this is the truth. I will be in a spiritual cell for my entire life.” ([08:06])

3. Personal Struggles Echoed in Sacks’s Writing

• Aviv noticed “rhymes” between phrases Sacks used about himself and those put in the mouths of his patients.
  • Example: Sacks’s own metaphor of feeling like the panther in Rilke’s poem ("trapped, caged") appears in his description of patients ([10:20]–[12:19]).
  • Aviv observes these overlaps, sometimes word-for-word.
• Aviv confronts the unsettling possibility that pieces of Sacks’s patient narratives may not be strictly factual—but instead projections and “confabulations” interwoven with his private anguish.

4. Fabrication, Confabulation, and Genre-Bending

• Sacks confessed in journals his guilt about embellishing or inventing details (“I feel...a sense of criminality...so guilty for making things up” ([13:00])).
• His “most flagrant fabrication” involved autistic twins supposedly exchanging massive prime numbers—an event unsupported by evidence but taken as scientific fact, influencing later research ([14:18]).
  • Rachel Aviv: “You might call these confabulations. They’re sort of half story, half fable, half made up. He was pretty open about the status...” ([13:31])
• This raises broader questions about how scientific storytelling, empathy, and artistic license interact.

5. Reader and Public Reactions

• Aviv’s article spurred public debate, with some using the revelations to attack science, while she intended a more nuanced discussion ([15:08]–[19:16]).
  • Rachel Aviv: “...there was a contingent of anti-science people...it almost was like, look, this sort of liberal darling of science fabricated things, like science is a sham. That made me sad”—but stresses Sacks's complexity and human struggle ([19:16]).
• Sacks’s subjects—or their families—often valued his care more than strict accuracy ([21:30]): “They didn’t fundamentally care...What they cared about was that there was...someone...making them feel...like they were someone who had a story to tell.”

6. Therapy, Self-Understanding, and Literary Projection

• Aviv reflects on how Sacks’s lifelong search for love played out in his patient stories: “He was, like, rehearsing this narrative...someone who is trapped...suddenly is kind of released and has this awakening. Many of his stories have that arc.” ([22:45])
• On writing as “working through”—for both Sacks and herself: “If you’re writing about something about which you have no sort of unsettled questions and curiosities, then the writing can be flatter for it.” ([23:56])

7. Moral Complexity of Doctor-Writer Role

• Sacks at times encouraged patients’ symptoms for literary or scientific insight, a problematic overlap of physician and author roles ([25:09]–[26:18]).
  • Comparison to RD Laing: “He would...want their tics to become floridly symptomatic, essentially because he felt like...he...was sort of gaining more insight...realizing it was fundamentally...helping his project.” ([25:19])

8. Legacy and Lessons

• In a 1989 PBS interview, Sacks said: “I would like it to be thought that I had listened carefully to what patients and others had told me, that I'd try to imagine what it was like for them...the feeling he bore witness.” ([26:29])
  • Aviv problematizes this, arguing bearing witness and storytelling are fundamentally different acts—a writer inevitably projects, edits, and sometimes distorts, blending empathy with self-interest. ([27:53])
• By the end of his life, Sacks did find romantic love—with writer Bill Hayes—offering a hopeful narrative twist after decades of isolation ([30:21]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Rachel Aviv on Sacks's skill:
  “I really admired his ability to just...delve deeply into the inner life of one person.” ([01:12])
• On Sacks and his lover:
  “My blood is like champagne.” ([07:38])
• On heartbreak and loneliness:
  “I will be in a spiritual cell for my entire life.” ([08:06])
• On discovering self-reference in Sacks’s writings:
  “...it was almost like rhymes between his own descriptions of himself and his descriptions of his patients.” ([09:34])
• On fabrication:
  “You might call these confabulations. They're sort of half story, half fable, half made up. He was pretty open about the status...” ([13:31])
• Aviv on the projection in Sacks’s work:
  “Taking phrases that he used to describe his own angst and sort of putting it onto his patients...” ([20:28])
• Family reaction:
  “What they cared about was that there was this...Who was, like, sitting with them for hours trying to understand them and making them feel...like...they were someone who had a story to tell.” ([21:30])
• On Sacks’s late-life love:
  “At the end of his life, he falls in love. And I just loved that you could find love at age 76.” ([30:30])

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• [01:12]–[02:57]: Sacks’s writing philosophy; impact on the medical humanities
• [04:35]–[08:25]: Sacks’s personal archives, therapy, relationships, and heartbreak
• [09:34]–[12:19]: Personal motifs echoing in patient narratives, discovery of literary “rhymes”
• [13:00]–[14:41]: Own admission of fabrication; example of invented case studies
• [15:08]–[19:16]: Public and internet reaction to Aviv’s story; complexity of Sacks’s legacy
• [21:30]–[22:08]: How patients' families responded to his portrayals
• [23:56]: Writing as a process of "working through" personal dilemmas
• [25:19]: Problematic ethics of the doctor-as-writer role
• [26:29]–[27:53]: Sacks on 'bearing witness,' Aviv’s critique on storytelling vs. witnessing
• [30:21]–[31:07]: Sacks’s late-life relationship with Bill Hayes

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Conclusion

This episode skillfully peels back the layers behind Oliver Sacks’s famous case studies and literary persona, showing how his writings were shaped by private suffering, longing, and projection. From heartbreak and solitude to the guilty art of embellishment, Sacks’s life story asks deep questions about truth, empathy, and the costs and gifts of turning life into narrative. For anyone interested in science, biography, or the fuzzy border between fact and fiction, this is a powerful listen.

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Transcript

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[Amy Padula]

I recently sat down with one of my favorite writers.

[Rachel Aviv]

I'm Rachel Aviv and I'm a staff writer at the New Yorker.

[Amy Padula]

But I called her up to talk about a different writer.

[Rachel Aviv]

I think I remember the first story I pitched for the New Yorker. I like tried to make it clear, like, don't worry, I'm not trying to do an Oliver Sacks piece because I didn't want them to think that I was daring to compete. I really admired his ability to just like delve into deeply into the inner life of one person.

[Amy Padula]

The late neurologist and best selling author Oliver Sacks. He's been referred to as the Poet Laureate of Medicine.

[Rachel Aviv]

He was like sort of like almost a figurehead for medical humanities in a way. Like this idea that we have been focusing too much on symptoms and data and that there is a human life behind all of this information.

[Amy Padula]

Oliver Sacks did something kind of wild for his time. He was a medical doctor who wrote intricate stories about the inner lives of his own patients.

[Rachel Aviv]

I do remember being in my early 20s reading a piece he'd written about a man who was blind and was sort of grappling with the possibility of regaining his sight. I loved how he was focused on one person, sort of one person's journey. He was so focused on the inner life of this person and that it was so textured, kind of was like, how did he know those details? How did he know that that man

[Amy Padula]

was thinking that maybe the best example of one of these Stories is from the book Awakenings, which he published in the early 1970s. He writes about spending 15 hour days at a hospital with a group of patients suffering from a disease called encephalitis lethargica, a sickness that left them catatonic, basically asleep while awake.

[Rachel Aviv]

Patients that no other doctors were really paying attention to and kind of developing a like wordless rapport with people that were really easy to dismiss as sort of not fully cognizant. And he spent so much time with them that he was able to sort of detect that they were not like comatose in the way that other people thought they were.

[Amy Padula]

That book was adapted for the screen and became an Academy Award nominated film. It starred Robert De Niro as a patient named Leonard and Robin Williams, who played a fictional Oliver Sacks. Towards the end of the movie, he gives a speech about the awakening of the human spirit.

[Various Advertisers/Interviewers]

That the human spirit is more powerful than any drug and that is what needs to be nourished. With work, play, friendship, family. These are the things that matter. This is what we'd forgotten, The simplest things.

[Amy Padula]

Basically, he meant human connection could somehow awaken the spirit beyond medical care alone. Late last year, Rachel wrote a huge magazine story about Oliver Sacks for the New Yorker.

[Rachel Aviv]

I became aware that Oliver Sacks had

[Amy Padula]

this enormous archive, an archive of diaries and letters that Sacks had kept over decades. He documented many, not just the lives of other patients, but his own experience as a patient in therapy. Rachel got in touch with his foundation and got permission to take a look.

[Rachel Aviv]

I was like, how is this possible that this amazing man was in therapy for 50 years? Like, what does a half century psychoanalytic process look like? I was just like, this man is so articulate about other people's psychic lives. What is happening in the therapeutic process and how, how much can someone change in 50 years of therapy? Like, how far does self knowledge go?

[Amy Padula]

Today we're gonna follow Rachel Aviv's journey through the life of one of the most famous science writers of our time. A profile of a man known for his truth telling in medicine, who Rachel

[Rachel Aviv]

discovered bent the truth in his journals. He would just sort of reflect on what he had done and try to make sense of it. And he would sort of think through like, art is the lie that tells the truth. Am I doing art or have I crossed a line?

[Amy Padula]

I'm Amy Padula. This is unexplainable. So for all of Oliver Sacks writing about the super intimate details about the lives of patients, he didn't share much about his own life with the public. For most of his career. In a 2002 interview, he said that his severe shyness, which he described as a disease, had been a lifelong impediment to his personal relationships. And for most of his life, he lived alone. What were some of the most surprising anecdotes or sort of things you learned about what was going on for him in his personal life?

[Rachel Aviv]

One of the most amazing sets of correspondence that I read was Sachs's letters to this man who lived in Berlin at the time. And they had met in Europe. They'd had this like whirlwind romance. And then Sachs moved to New York.

[Amy Padula]

After a couple weeks, Sachs went back home to New York City and the two start writing to each other.

[Rachel Aviv]

And then their entire sort of affair took place in these letters. And they were just like thrilling letters. Each one, it was like Sachs was trying to outdo himself, to find new expressions of, like, the intensity of his love and his sense that he was merging with this man and that for the first time in his life, he felt at peace with being a gay man. He was seeing the world through new eyes.

[Amy Padula]

Sachs wrote about these intense feelings. There's a line that describes his happiness. I wonder if you could recall it.

[Rachel Aviv]

My blood is like champagne. And then two weeks passed in which he didn't get a letter from this man. And suddenly, like, all of Sachs kind of euphoria turned in on him and he started to think like, I was delusional, like I was part of a two man delusion, like, this was never love. I'm always going to be alone and I always have.

[Amy Padula]

The man eventually wrote to apologize, but for Sachs, the damage was done.

[Rachel Aviv]

And he was like, yeah, this is the truth. I will be in a spiritual cell for my entire life. And he finally just completely cut off the relationship with this man and then began to feel suicidal, which led to him beginning therapy for the next 50 years.

[Amy Padula]

After that early relationship, Sachs suffered. He couldn't make friends, he couldn't connect with people. He became celibate and wrote obsessively.

[Rachel Aviv]

Some of his correspondence with other gay men in the 50s and 60s and 70s and even 80s, like the sort of anguished state of being a gay man at that time. I think it's easy to almost forget how excruciating it was then. And so many of the people he was corresponding with, they would be like testing the waters to see if they could reveal to the other one that they were gay. There was so much sort of self hate and sort of tortured conversation around it 30, 40 years ago felt really Alive in his letters as well as his journals. Just the sense of like self punishing, self hiding experiences. I could see how he was sort of expressing a feeling of stuckness in life.

[Amy Padula]

Was there a moment in the reporting where you started to realize that his personal life was seeping into the work?

[Rachel Aviv]

So I had read many of his letters. I went back and I did a lot of rereading because it was like the first time I read everything, I didn't know what I was looking for. And then there would be times like at one point I was rereading Awakenings and I remember reading one of the patients describing her blood as being like champagne, which was striking because I, you know, that's the phrase he'd used in his letters to this lover from Berlin. So there were just these kinds of. It was almost like rhymes between his own descriptions of himself and his descriptions of his patients.

[Amy Padula]

One of the most striking rhymes that she found had to do with a particular poem by Rilke. The poem is about a panther who feels trapped, caged. Where had you seen that poem before?

[Rachel Aviv]

It was in his letters to describe how he felt when he was trying to write his first book about migraines. And I just remembered that phrase. And then I searched through my notes and I saw another reference where he had also used that phrase in a letter to his therapist. So it was clearly an important poem for him in his own self conceptualization in these moments of crisis.

[Amy Padula]

The poem evoked something similar to the way Sacks was feeling in his journals about not being able to express his sexuality and his personal life, not being able to connect.

[Rachel Aviv]

And then I was reading Awakenings and I was reading the chapter about Leonard, who's sort of the star of the book.

[Amy Padula]

Leonard, played by Robert De Niro in the movie adaptation, suffers from a sleeping sickness. He lives in a sort of trance like state. Sachs gave patients like Leonard a drug called L dopa, which changes the brain's dopamine levels. In his book Awakenings, Sachs writes that Leonard would spell out answers to questions that Sachs asked him because he couldn't speak.

[Rachel Aviv]

I just noticed that he said that Leonard typed out on this like typing board that he felt like the panther and Rilkes poem.

[Amy Padula]

In the movie adaptation, Robin Williams, as Oliver Sacks reads that poem, his gaze

[Various Advertisers/Interviewers]

from staring through the bars has grown so weary that it can take in nothing more. For him, it is as though there were a thousand bars and behind the thousand bars no world. As he paces in cramped circles over

[Rachel Aviv]

and over, I thought, like, that's a strange coincidence that his patient would happen to sort of cite this poem that had been so meaningful to Sachs. And then I became kind of more attentive to those moments.

[Amy Padula]

What was going through your mind as you saw these rhymes, as you put it, play out? Was there any betrayal you felt as a reader seeing this kind of, like, appear in the records?

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah, I mean, I think that made me feel like, okay, well, I can't trust that any particular detail is true.

[Amy Padula]

Did Oliver Sacks know he was fabricating things?

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah, it was really reading the journals after I had been reading them for a couple months when I just read a passage where he straight out says, you know, I feel like. So I can't remember the exact phrasing that he's feeling this sense of criminality and that he feels so guilty for making things up. I would say that a man who mistook his wife for a hat had a lot of fabrications in it. That book then made him extremely famous. And I think he felt a lot like much of the guilt that he expresses in his journals is about that particular book. But the strange thing is, when that book was about to be published, he wrote his brother and said, you might call these confabulations. They're sort of half story, half fable, half made up. He was pretty open about the status. So I don't know what happened in the publishing process. Somehow these were taken as, like, case studies that were supposed to be straight fact. And he seemed pretty clear early on that that's not what they were, at least to himself. But suddenly it became, like, wildly famous and he became this huge figure. Sachs himself says, like, this was my most flagrant fabrication. And it involved these two twins who had autism, who were institutionalized. And Sac said that they were, like, exchanging prime numbers up to, I think, 20 digits. And that finding got a lot of attention because, like, no one had known this to be a human capacity. And so psychologists and mathematicians had written about this with some really defending, like, the importance of this finding. And so that felt really like a space where a case study had actually had an impact on people's understanding of human capacities. So I think I tend to agree with Sachs that that was the most flagrant moment or transgression.

[Amy Padula]

Rachel's magazine story came out in December of last year, and it got people talking.

[Rachel Aviv]

I did see people on the Internet, like, putting on. Putting their own headlines on the piece and sort of making it all about. You know, he fabricated. That kind of felt sad to me because that didn't feel like if I wanted it to be more complicated, than just oh, let's dismiss Oliver Sacks. He was making stuff up.

[Amy Padula]

We'll be back after a short break.

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[Various Advertisers/Interviewers]

Is this Karen Ifill? Yes.

[Rachel Aviv]

My name is Harold Crick.

[Various Advertisers/Interviewers]

I believe you're writing a story about me.

[Amy Padula]

You talked about how some of the comments that you saw in your piece, the sort of TLDR headline sax fabricated stuff, which is true, but you also said that was frustrating and I'm wondering

[Rachel Aviv]

why something interesting happened where I couldn't like tell you quite who or what, but it felt like there was a contingent of like anti science people on social media. It almost was like, oh look, this sort of liberal darling of science fabricated things like science is a sham. I guess I also just felt like the takeaway of my story, I did not want it to be just oh my God, let's throw Sachs out the window. He fabricated things. And so that seemed like there was some of that going on and I was sad about that. But it's within this much larger context of one man's sort of struggle during the time when he was fabricating a lot of other sort of literary stars were doing similar things. So it's also within a historical context. But yeah, I think there are moments in which to me it was almost the projection that was most striking, like taking phrases that he used to describe his own angst and sort of putting it onto his patients. I guess I wanted to think about how those fabrications or those sort of. Of exaggerations feel revealing of dynamics in the way we respond to this kind of writing and the way that other people respond to it and the kind of expectations we have for, like, what empathy as a writer looks like. I think it's more about this genre of writing that he inspired, this sort of telling tales about illness that are kind of supposed to inspire or show you, like, the secret gift of your illness. I think, like, if anything, I would want it to inspire, like, more kind of thinking about the relationship between, like, a writer and a subject, and particularly a sort of doctor and the patient subject, and how much. How much of ourselves we bring onto that encounter sometimes without realizing sometimes.

[Amy Padula]

Do you know how any of his patients felt about his rendering?

[Rachel Aviv]

Leonard's family loved him. They didn't necessarily think the book was all accurate, but they were just so grateful for the time and the care that he had put into that relationship. Like the families that Leonard and his mother just adored him, and the other patients I talked to as well really adored him. They didn't fundamentally care, you know, about how they were written about in this book. What they cared about was that there was this. Who was, like, sitting with them for hours trying to understand them and making them feel, you know, like. That they were someone who had a story to tell.

[Amy Padula]

A huge part of Sachs's life that Rachel's story eliminates was his ongoing struggle with his sexuality. After that early relationship in Berlin, he lived unhappily closeted and celibate for decades. You unpack some of his battles in therapy and how some of that was getting worked out in the writing. At one point in the piece, you suggest that Sack spent much of his life searching for love. He once wrote, we spend our lives searching for what we have lost, and one day, perhaps we will suddenly find it. I just wonder what you make of that as you were sort of seeing these patterns crop up in the work.

[Rachel Aviv]

I mean, that idea that in therapy you're, like, working through. I like that phrase, working through, because I think probably most writers choose subjects to some degree because they're working through ideas that are important or problematic to them, and then they sort of displace it onto these other subjects where they're working through. And it felt like he was, like, rehearsing this narrative, which was someone who is trapped in this cell, this sort of spiritual cell. This sense of being in a cage suddenly is kind of released and has this awakening. And many of his stories have that arc. And so then it was striking to see. I mean, it was almost like the longed for outcome that he keeps sort of playing out in his work.

[Amy Padula]

Do you think about what you do as a reporter any differently after learning about sort of how Sachs identified with his subjects? Do you think differently about what you do at all?

[Rachel Aviv]

I think it was like part of a. Like a longer conversation with myself. As I age as a writer, my curiosities change and my identifications change. And so therefore, like, when I'm writing a story about a family, for instance, like I'm going to. I might actually change the kinds of questions I'm looking at because of where I am in life, or I find that I'm often, like, writing about people with complicated relationships to work. And that's because there's a question I have about my own relationship to work or. So, yes, I think, like, writing is always a kind of working through. And in a way, I think that if it's not a working through, it's less rich. Like, if you're writing about something about which you have no sort of unsettled questions and curiosities, then the writing can be flatter for it. So I think you do want some of that kind of like, identification and projection energy, but it can be taken way too far and too far in unethical ways and in really problematic ways. So it feels like a subject that does have stakes in my life and in sort of any kind of writing.

[Amy Padula]

He was a physician treating them and a writer observing them. And I wonder if if anything came up for you in terms of, like, that split role.

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah, I mean, I think there was some, like, problematic, like, RD Lang type stuff going on where, like, like, RD Lang is the psychiatrist who kind of wanted his patients with psychosis to, like. It was almost like he was bringing their psychosis to full fruition so that he could gain more insights about the nature of madness. And Sacks actually writes about that too, that kind of guilt that, like some of his patients with Tourette's syndrome, he would, like, want their tics to reach sort of tick as to become floridly symptomatic, essentially because he felt like in that process, he, as the writer and the researcher was sort of gaining more insight into the nature of the disease. And I think he, like, told himself that that could be good for the patient, while also sort of realizing it was fundamentally like, you know, helping his project.

[Amy Padula]

After he had become famous for books like Awakenings and the man who Mistook his wife for a hat. Sachs did this interview in 1989 with a reporter from PBS.

[Rachel Aviv]

100 years from now, how would you

[Stitch Fix Advertiser]

like to be remembered? I would like it to be thought that I had listened carefully to what patients and others had told me, that I'd try to imagine what it was like for them, and that I'd try to convey this and to use a biblical term, the feeling he bore witness.

[Rachel Aviv]

I think, like, bearing witness in medicine has come to mean, like, you are sort of present in someone's moment of suffering to allow them to feel that they are seen and they are heard and that they're not alone and that you're kind of, like, doing this thing where you're not turning away like other people. It's just too hard. This idea of bearing witness is very kind of central in medical humanities, but I don't know that you can bear witness and also, like, write a story about someone. Those are two very different acts. And I think Sachs was sort of merging them both and presenting a model of how both can be merged. And there's a lot of, like, self interest involved, or not self interest, but sort of you have, like, a. Your mind is doing. Calculating things when you're thinking about how someone becomes a story. And when you're bearing witness, I think you need to be blank in a way that you probably can't be, as sort of an authorial, like, imagination. Sachs said he wanted to be remembered as someone who bore witness, and I get that. But I also think that it is very hard to do that when you're, like, telling a sort of magical fable about someone's illness and sort of the gifts that it might have bestowed upon them.

[Amy Padula]

What I find so fascinating about this story is that there's Oliver Sacks the doctor and Oliver Sacks the writer, and Oliver Sacks the man. And what happens when all of those versions of Sachs collide into each other?

[Rachel Aviv]

I think anyone would kind of say that one of the genius things he did was to see all these patients who were in, like, comatose states and other doctors had dismissed them, and he saw something in them. Like, he felt a sense of identification because he also saw himself as, like, the living dead and someone who'd been buried alive. These were words that he used. I think he was capable of imagining that there was, like, a real person, there was, like, a real consciousness, a real lively intelligence, like, sucked away by this illness inside these people. And so he spent enough time with them to realize that that was true. So I think, like, part of that identification and Projection, like, allowed him to make the discoveries he made. And then the second half of that was that the projection and the identification sort of obscured the specificity and possibly, like, the suffering of what they were going through because he kind of made their lives beautiful. I'm curious, like, how we turn our own emptiness in our life into art and what the costs of that are, how we manage that through that process

[Amy Padula]

of bearing witness to other people. Sachs was also working through something in himself.

[Rachel Aviv]

I was also, like, moved by his honesty and the pain of kind of trying to figure that out himself. Everyone, like, hides things from themselves, but I felt like he really was trying to sort of figure out, like, both justify it and flagellate himself for it.

[Amy Padula]

By 2008, Oliver Sacks had met someone. Another writer. His name was Bill Hayes.

[Rachel Aviv]

He was a science writer. They had lunch one day, and it just sort of proceeded from there. At the end of his life, he falls in love. And I just loved that you could find love at age 76. He was so stuck for all of those years. He couldn't come out for all those years. He was doing his best to try. And it just. Yeah, that felt like sort of, I guess, tragic, but beautiful in a way. Like, just that. That sheer effort to sort of understand yourself even if you really can't.

[Amy Padula]

This episode was produced by me, Amy Padula. It was edited by Julia Longoria, with help from Joanna Solotarov, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, and music from Noam Hassenfeld. Melissa Hirsch checked the facts. Jorge just is our editorial director. Sally Helm and Meredith Hodnot are two of all the great poet laureates of Unexplainable and Bird. Pinkerton sat on the A train as it barreled towards Washington Heights. She figured someone might think she looked weird or something. She had a broken platypus guitar on her back, an octopus key around her neck, and a. A boomerang sticking out of her pocket. But, nope, just a normal day on the subway. As always, thank you to Brian Resnik for co creating the show with Noam and Bird. If you'd like to support this show and the journalism that VOX does, we would love it if you would become a member. It's really easy to do. Just go to Vox.com members. You'll get access to all of Vox's journalism. For those of you who have emailed us to let us know that you signed up because of Unexplainable, thank you. If you can't join our membership, though, that's okay. If you want to leave a nice review on your podcast platform. Five stars or a written review, we would really appreciate it a lot. Or if you want to tell someone in your life that they might want to listen to the show, those things make a real difference. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast network. We'll be back soon with another episode about everything we don't yet know.

[Rachel Aviv]

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