It's Only Temporary

by Evan Handler

At 24, Evan Handler was a young actor with a thriving Broadway career when he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. He spent the next five years battling what he'd been assured was an incurable illness, determined to prove that assessment wrong. And he did: He has been considered cured now for nearly twenty years. But how easy is it to embrace a life you've been convinced you'd never have? And what if your life doesn't seem all it was cracked up to be when it was nearly taken away? Handler's response was to chronicle a journey toward love and gratitude that's by turns heartfelt, shocking and very funny. Structured as a collection of linked autobiographical essays, It's Only Temporary is a startlingly candid and often hilarious portrait of one man's struggle to locate and embrace love and happiness within a life he knows he's lucky just to have. It's both a deeply personal memoir and a wide-ranging meditation on life, love, faith, gratitude, and mortality. It's Only Temporary is an unexpected coming-of-age story in which one man comes to accept the concept of mortality only after the most strenuous objections. In finally doing so, he discovers a life much richer than he ever hoped for.

240 pages, ebook

First published May 1, 2008

About the author

IT'S ONLY TEMPORARY: THE GOOD NEWS AND THE BAD NEWS OF BEING ALIVE, by actor/author Evan Handler.

Evan Handler is an actor best known as Harry Goldenblatt from HBO’s Sex and the City and the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors. Handler currently co-stars in Showtime’s hit series Californication co-starring David Duchovny. His past acting credits include Lost, The West Wing, Ransom, and Taps. Handler also has written for Elle, Mirabella, O, the Oprah Magazine, USA Weekend, and The New Yorker.