I struggled with parts of the book, even as I understand how difficult it must have been to set this story down knowing paper. Rushdie recounts the horrifying attack during a talk at Chautauqua by a religious extremist in August 2022, and relates his recovery in (sometimes excruciating) detail. His pain and shock is balanced by finding love again late in life, and these two parts of his experience both inform this story. After the attack, aside from his physical recovery, Rushdie had to make sense of what might be left of his life and what the purpose of his survival ought to be, a universal struggle for seniors, and of course he brings a beautiful eloquence to the working-out of life and death issues. The penultimate chapter, about his atheism and the artist’s right to have his atheism inform his art; his nutshell history of artists’ resistance to religious zealots was inspiring and worth the price of the book, as was his imagined colloquy with his would-be assassin. An important historical document about our time.