It’s Not Yet Dark (A Memoir)

Author: Simon Fitzmaurice

Daringly, brutally poignant, It’s Not Yet Dark is the closest thing to pure love that I have read since The Shack and just as memorable.  As Simon Fitzmaurice, an award winning writer, screenwriter and film director tells how he has lived with his wife and children since he was diagnosed with ALS in 2008 and given a maximum of three years to live, we remain in awe of his life (he is now on a ventilator).

Against all odds, Simon and his wife conceived twins after his diagnosis and they now have 5 young children.  Distilled and throbbing, It’s Not Yet Dark creates poetry out of the life that Simon loves and lives – his family, his wife, his friends – in such a beautiful book of vignettes that it comes as close to luminescence as the moonlight.  We hear of young Simon’s life before and after his diagnosis of ALS and follow him and his family as he works and commits to his work.  Fitzmaurice, in this memoir, creates a language all of his own that palpates within and without, sometimes in gestures, sometimes in moments, sometimes in stories and facts.  It’s Not Yet Dark pulls you in to Simon’s every experience, with such emotional purity that we feel what he feels and see what he sees – the joy of every second he has as his illness ravages him physical deterioration behind a beautiful mind.

Like an Irish mist, It’s Not Yet Dark unveils all pretense of living with an illness that kills daily, that can terminate life at any moment, leaving the brilliance and elegance of a writer at his best, peeling his life like an onion, living with presence and love at every opportunity.

Thrillingly, achingly authentic prose that reveals an inner life of one human being with the courage to live fully every single moment of his life.  Compromised as it is, Simon Fitzmaurice’s life is a complete and miraculous act of loving life.

• We received a copy of this book for review.
• It’s Not Yet Dark is available at Amazon.com and other booksellers