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Incurable Gifts: My Weepy, Wobbly, Wonderful Life With Parkinson's
Incurable Gifts is a book that defies every expectation we have about memoirs of illness. It is not a story of suffering—it's a masterclass in finding grace where none should exist.
With prose that alternates between laugh-out-loud funny and quietly devastating, O'Connell chronicles his 20-year journey with Parkinson's Disease, transforming what could have been a tale of decline into something far more a meditation on what it means to truly live. His writing crackles with the energy of a career journalist who knows how to tell a story, but more importantly, knows which stories matter. From the opening scene of crawling barefoot through a parking garage to tender moments making avocado toast for his dying mother, O'Connell reveals truths about family, work, love, and mortality that will resonate with anyone who has ever faced their own limitations.
What makes this book extraordinary is O'Connell's refusal to be defined by his disease. Yes, Parkinson's forced him from a successful journalism career. Yes, it makes simple tasks monumentally difficult. But it also gave him time— to really see his mother before she died, to understand his father's legacy, time to appreciate the love of his wife, and to discover that while he spent years trying to create a professional legacy, his real legacy was sleeping down the hall.
This is a book about falling down—literally and figuratively—and finding unexpected gifts in the wreckage. It's about learning that courage isn't just running into burning buildings like his firefighter father did, but sometimes just getting out of bed. It's about discovering that the worst thing that happens to you might also teach you everything you need to know about what matters.
Incurable Gifts is itself a gift—to anyone who has faced adversity, to anyone who has wondered about their legacy, to anyone who has asked themselves if it's wonderful to be alive. O'Connell doesn't just answer that question; he shows us why the answer, despite everything, is yes.
This is a book that will make you laugh, make you cry, and most importantly, make you think differently about what it means to live a meaningful life. It's a reminder that sometimes our greatest catastrophes can become our most profound teachers, and that even an incurable disease can offer gifts we never knew we needed.
With prose that alternates between laugh-out-loud funny and quietly devastating, O'Connell chronicles his 20-year journey with Parkinson's Disease, transforming what could have been a tale of decline into something far more a meditation on what it means to truly live. His writing crackles with the energy of a career journalist who knows how to tell a story, but more importantly, knows which stories matter. From the opening scene of crawling barefoot through a parking garage to tender moments making avocado toast for his dying mother, O'Connell reveals truths about family, work, love, and mortality that will resonate with anyone who has ever faced their own limitations.
What makes this book extraordinary is O'Connell's refusal to be defined by his disease. Yes, Parkinson's forced him from a successful journalism career. Yes, it makes simple tasks monumentally difficult. But it also gave him time— to really see his mother before she died, to understand his father's legacy, time to appreciate the love of his wife, and to discover that while he spent years trying to create a professional legacy, his real legacy was sleeping down the hall.
This is a book about falling down—literally and figuratively—and finding unexpected gifts in the wreckage. It's about learning that courage isn't just running into burning buildings like his firefighter father did, but sometimes just getting out of bed. It's about discovering that the worst thing that happens to you might also teach you everything you need to know about what matters.
Incurable Gifts is itself a gift—to anyone who has faced adversity, to anyone who has wondered about their legacy, to anyone who has asked themselves if it's wonderful to be alive. O'Connell doesn't just answer that question; he shows us why the answer, despite everything, is yes.
This is a book that will make you laugh, make you cry, and most importantly, make you think differently about what it means to live a meaningful life. It's a reminder that sometimes our greatest catastrophes can become our most profound teachers, and that even an incurable disease can offer gifts we never knew we needed.
164 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 20, 2025
7 people are currently reading
36 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 23, 2026
You’d be hard pressed to name something funny, or happy, or personally enriching about Parkinson’s disease but somehow Jim O’Connell manages all that and then some. In Incurable Gifts, My Weepy, Wobbly, Wonderful Life with Parkinson’s, O’Connell invites us to share a journey of reflection on what makes life worth living with or without the affliction.
We learn a lot about O’Connell on this journey. First, that he’s a towering talent, six foot six inches of journalistic ambition and ideas, who thrived in his career, editing and planning news coverage in the reportorial scrum that is the nation’s capital. Second, that he is incredibly self-deprecating, reveling in his supposed mediocrities and attributing his successes in business, life and love to dumb luck and loyal friendships. Third, that he’s not going to let something as trivial as an incurable neurological disorder cause him to lose sight of what truly matters. We accompany him, through a series of essays, as he shakes, stumbles and gobbles down pills to mitigate and accommodate the effects of the condition that has transformed his life.
“Thank you, Parkinson’s, you bastard,” O’Connell writes. “You have given me what everyone wants, a chance to step away from earning a living and learn just to live.”
Incurable Gifts is equal parts memoir and instruction booklet, poignant, prickly and excruciatingly honest.
We follow O’Connell from an idyllic, if chaotic, Midwestern childhood to perhaps the shortest career on record for a forklift mechanic. The stories of his search for gainful employment in journalism are marked by interview gaffes and guffaws. It’s not surprising to learn that his toe hold in the fourth estate began inauspiciously at a paper operating out of the basement of the publisher’s home. But O’Connell perseveres and thrives as a son, brother, journalist, spouse and father.
His humanity shines throughout, which is where the instruction book element of this work kicks in. He doesn’t spare us the pain, nor does he portray himself as a saint. For example, he documents how he brought a novice nurse to tears, crushing both her spirit and his own, only to steel them both for their difficult paths forward. He bemoans the end of a life of golf, basketball, drinking, deadline editing and dancing with his wife at the White House. He worries about how his children will survive without him. Then he recounts replying to routine questions from his health care team about whether he has considered suicide. “I’d say ‘no’ because I’m not that kind. I’m mostly happy and grateful.” To the follow-up question – Is it wonderful to be alive? – he recalls responding: “Who has tasted key lime pie or been kissed or tumbled in an ocean wave and doesn’t think being alive is amazing?”
It’s clear O’Connell wouldn’t wish the Incurable Gifts of Parkinson’s on his worst enemy. But it’s also evident that he hopes we will all benefit from the perspective on life that these gifts have afforded him. We are all richer for the reading. It’s a good book. As good as key lime pie.
We learn a lot about O’Connell on this journey. First, that he’s a towering talent, six foot six inches of journalistic ambition and ideas, who thrived in his career, editing and planning news coverage in the reportorial scrum that is the nation’s capital. Second, that he is incredibly self-deprecating, reveling in his supposed mediocrities and attributing his successes in business, life and love to dumb luck and loyal friendships. Third, that he’s not going to let something as trivial as an incurable neurological disorder cause him to lose sight of what truly matters. We accompany him, through a series of essays, as he shakes, stumbles and gobbles down pills to mitigate and accommodate the effects of the condition that has transformed his life.
“Thank you, Parkinson’s, you bastard,” O’Connell writes. “You have given me what everyone wants, a chance to step away from earning a living and learn just to live.”
Incurable Gifts is equal parts memoir and instruction booklet, poignant, prickly and excruciatingly honest.
We follow O’Connell from an idyllic, if chaotic, Midwestern childhood to perhaps the shortest career on record for a forklift mechanic. The stories of his search for gainful employment in journalism are marked by interview gaffes and guffaws. It’s not surprising to learn that his toe hold in the fourth estate began inauspiciously at a paper operating out of the basement of the publisher’s home. But O’Connell perseveres and thrives as a son, brother, journalist, spouse and father.
His humanity shines throughout, which is where the instruction book element of this work kicks in. He doesn’t spare us the pain, nor does he portray himself as a saint. For example, he documents how he brought a novice nurse to tears, crushing both her spirit and his own, only to steel them both for their difficult paths forward. He bemoans the end of a life of golf, basketball, drinking, deadline editing and dancing with his wife at the White House. He worries about how his children will survive without him. Then he recounts replying to routine questions from his health care team about whether he has considered suicide. “I’d say ‘no’ because I’m not that kind. I’m mostly happy and grateful.” To the follow-up question – Is it wonderful to be alive? – he recalls responding: “Who has tasted key lime pie or been kissed or tumbled in an ocean wave and doesn’t think being alive is amazing?”
It’s clear O’Connell wouldn’t wish the Incurable Gifts of Parkinson’s on his worst enemy. But it’s also evident that he hopes we will all benefit from the perspective on life that these gifts have afforded him. We are all richer for the reading. It’s a good book. As good as key lime pie.
February 11, 2026
In the sizable canon of books that record authors' major health setbacks, surely there is a place for the essential "Incurable Gifts: My Weepy, Wobbly, Wonderful Life With Parkinson's."
Solving Parkinson's has recently become more urgent, with recent studies showing a 50% increase in victims, with age and environment thought to be causes; in 2024, Congress failed to pass legislation that would have created a national Parkinson's Disease task force. About 1 million Americans must wait for their disease to be cured.
O'Connell chronicles in somewhat random order his coming to grips with a notoriously fatal disease that equally infamously has no cure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his nonlinear narrative is pitch-perfect.
Spoiler alert: The author of this episodic book is someday going to die from Parkinson's disease, period. He makes no attempt to varnish the prognosis, which makes this book even more engrossing.
But anyone looking for a weepy, self-pitying series of even weepier and more self-pitying anecdotes will be disappointed. This is a first-person travel guide by a journalist, not the teary musings of a celebrity who has enlisted a ghost writer and literary marketing team.
O'Connell is not going down without a fight, and not without leveraging his horrible slow-motion affliction to make not only his family's life better, but also his own.
He started out as a newspaper journalist, including a stint at The San Diego Union-Tribune, but wanted more out of his career.
After moving to Washington, D.C., he was hired as a reporter and editor in the pressure-cooker newsroom of Bloomberg News. There he competed head-to-head with the Reuters and Dow Jones news agencies to publish breaking news moments ahead of the pack.
In the red-hot race to catch the eyeballs of investors who pay huge amounts to get news first, Bloomberg, Dow Jones and Reuters measured journalism success in split-seconds, an atmosphere not conducive to faltering physical or mental acuity.
It was in this cauldron of highly compensated journalists where after 20 years O'Connell realized he could no longer type or think fast enough to beat the competition. He was developing full-blown Parkinson's Disease, one paragraph at a time. On his way to editing some 30,000 articles at Bloomberg, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's at age 46, put on permanent disability at age 56, and has been there ever since.
The rarity of an author also being a good wire service journalist means this 162-page book is tightly written, with no repetition, hesitation or digression. O'Connell doesn't have time to mess around, even when describing his brain surgery, and he doesn't waste the reader's time. No soporifics here.
O'Connell's series of brief essays leads to a conclusion the reader can easily guess, but the author himself only discovers en route: Parkinson's Disease is about the journey and not the destination.
Solving Parkinson's has recently become more urgent, with recent studies showing a 50% increase in victims, with age and environment thought to be causes; in 2024, Congress failed to pass legislation that would have created a national Parkinson's Disease task force. About 1 million Americans must wait for their disease to be cured.
O'Connell chronicles in somewhat random order his coming to grips with a notoriously fatal disease that equally infamously has no cure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his nonlinear narrative is pitch-perfect.
Spoiler alert: The author of this episodic book is someday going to die from Parkinson's disease, period. He makes no attempt to varnish the prognosis, which makes this book even more engrossing.
But anyone looking for a weepy, self-pitying series of even weepier and more self-pitying anecdotes will be disappointed. This is a first-person travel guide by a journalist, not the teary musings of a celebrity who has enlisted a ghost writer and literary marketing team.
O'Connell is not going down without a fight, and not without leveraging his horrible slow-motion affliction to make not only his family's life better, but also his own.
He started out as a newspaper journalist, including a stint at The San Diego Union-Tribune, but wanted more out of his career.
After moving to Washington, D.C., he was hired as a reporter and editor in the pressure-cooker newsroom of Bloomberg News. There he competed head-to-head with the Reuters and Dow Jones news agencies to publish breaking news moments ahead of the pack.
In the red-hot race to catch the eyeballs of investors who pay huge amounts to get news first, Bloomberg, Dow Jones and Reuters measured journalism success in split-seconds, an atmosphere not conducive to faltering physical or mental acuity.
It was in this cauldron of highly compensated journalists where after 20 years O'Connell realized he could no longer type or think fast enough to beat the competition. He was developing full-blown Parkinson's Disease, one paragraph at a time. On his way to editing some 30,000 articles at Bloomberg, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's at age 46, put on permanent disability at age 56, and has been there ever since.
The rarity of an author also being a good wire service journalist means this 162-page book is tightly written, with no repetition, hesitation or digression. O'Connell doesn't have time to mess around, even when describing his brain surgery, and he doesn't waste the reader's time. No soporifics here.
O'Connell's series of brief essays leads to a conclusion the reader can easily guess, but the author himself only discovers en route: Parkinson's Disease is about the journey and not the destination.
January 29, 2026
I strongly recommend this book to anyone dealing with an illness or other unwanted change in their life. It’s a series of vignettes about Jim O’Connell’s life, his many great experiences and also his more recent challenges after a Parkinson’s diagnosis. The grace with which he’s addressed this adverse reshaping of his life is shown throughout these brief and beautifully written chapters, each of which ends with something special — an ironic observation, a laugh or a life lesson.
February 4, 2026
A gem of a book containing short stories that are funny, poignant, wise, and sustaining for those dealing with Parkinson's or any other serious and permanent illness. It's educational for those wanting to better understand.
I also greatly enjoyed the stories describing the author's work as editor at Bloomberg Government.
I also greatly enjoyed the stories describing the author's work as editor at Bloomberg Government.
February 18, 2026
The writer rambles on a bit, but that's just a part of his musings in life with Parkinson's.
If you want to understand what a person's life is like with Parkinson's, read this book.
It's interesting to see how the author's perspective evolved over time.
If you want to understand what a person's life is like with Parkinson's, read this book.
It's interesting to see how the author's perspective evolved over time.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews