Codeine Diary: True Confessions of a Reckless Hemophiliac

by Tom Andrews

In a resonant, haunting, and often hilarious memoir, the author recounts his battle with hemophilia, a battle he was determined to win, pursuing such potentially catastrophic hobbies as playing in a raucous punk rock band and racing motorcycles. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Health, Poetry

238 pages, Paperback

First published February 2, 1998

Reviews

[Michele · Rating 3 out of 5]

He goes back in forth in the book covering the "present" time of when he's having a bleed and then covering his past with his condition and then a lot of his family history. His brother has a kidney disease that requires him to have home dialysis.

I liked the beginning. Gave a history of what he had been through living with hemophilia in the time of HIV. There could have been a LOT edited out though with him being in the hospital going through the recovery. I almost didn't finish the book because it was getting repetitive but I'm so glad I did finish it. The last 20-30 pages were my favorite. There's a completely awesome picture of his family's 1972 Christmas card in there. It's AMAZING and hilarious.

Would I recommend it.......maybe, with the preface that it gets a little repetitive and stale in the middle....

[Anjana V. Nair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this during the flu, which turned out to be either the perfect or the worst conditions, I still can’t decide. Andrews wrote a lot of it doped on codeine after a bad internal bleed, and reading it half-feverish on the couch, I kept losing track of whether the woozy, drifty quality of the prose was him or me. Probably both.

It’s a memoir about being a hemophiliac, but that undersells it. Andrews grew up in West Virginia as the “healthy” kid because his older brother was dying of a kidney disease - his blood wouldn’t clot, his brother’s wouldn’t stop. He writes about that without making a big tragic thing of it, which is part of why it hits. He also raced motorcycles and played in a punk band and held a Guinness record for clapping for fourteen hours straight at age eleven, all of which sounds invented and isn’t.

The hemophilia stuff is genuinely scary in a quiet way. Ninety percent of severe hemophiliacs who got blood infusions between 1978 and 1985 ended up with HIV. He didn’t. His friends did. He doesn’t dwell on it, but you feel him carrying it.

What I loved: the sentences. Absolutely magical! He was a poet first and you can tell - he notices weird small things and lets them sit. The childhood bits are funny in a way memoirs about illness usually aren’t.

What didn’t fully work: it wanders. Some chapters feel like they fell out of a notebook and into the book without anyone double-checking. He reprints the actual clapping-record affidavits, which is cute once and then less so.

Then I looked him up and found out he died at 40, a few years after this came out, from the same condition. Which made the whole loose, unfinished feeling of it land differently. Like I’d been reading a letter he didn’t get to finish.

Solid flu book. Sad in a way that snuck up on me.

[Sally · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because I was introduced to Andrews through a poem used in the Biola Advent Project this year. My curiosity was piqued by the brief biographical information in the devotional, so I decided to read this book. It was constructed in an interesting way, combining his experiences of enduring a bad bleed and resulting hospital stay, his setting a Guiness world record as a 12 year old for clapping his hands all day, and his reflections on his life thus far, particularly dwelling on his brother and his brother's kidney problems that had caused his early death.

So! Lots going on! I found his story intriguing (I don't know why hemophilia has always intrigued me, but it has, ever since I read about the poor Romanov heir.) In light of the poem I read, I assume Andrews moved closer to God in the years after writing this book. In the book he seemed to be wrestling a lot with his mysterious situation (his hemophilia had been caused by a genetic mutation, rather than a hereditary condition; despite numerous blood transfusions, he was one of the few who did not contract AIDS) and his brother's devout faith.

[Cheryl Jensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although presented as a memoir, the material of Codeine Diary largely occurs during a short two-week slice of the author's life. In the final chapter Tom Andrews reveals the body of the book is a copy of his diary from 1989, describing an incident in which he fell on ice and experienced significant hemophiliac bleed. This accounts for the stream of consciousness style of the narrative, and the concentrated introspection which is at times rather tiresome. The chapters are interspersed with his memories of achieving a place in the Guinness Book of World Records at age 11 by clapping continuously for over 14 hours. The author includes copies of the affidavits required to prove his accomplishments, a strange choice as these also are not engaging reading. Mr. Andrews does provide an interesting, though limited, window into his experiences and concerns of what it is like to live with hemophilia. Later editions of Codeine Diary are subtitled True Confessions of a Reckless Hemophiliac, rather than a memoir. It's a more catchy but rather exaggerated titled.

Mr. Andrews died in 2001 at age 40 from complications of a blood condition which caused clotting.

[Jennifer D. Munro · Rating 3 out of 5]

I quite liked this book but was not blown away by it. I found the hemophilia passages much more educational and compelling that the flashbacks to his record-breaking hand-clapping as a boy. I must admit that I was dismally unaware of what living with this disease is like.