http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/nyregion/07towns.html?_r=0
Loss of Speech Evokes the Voice of a Writer
By PETER APPLEBOME
Published: March 6, 2011
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LARCHMONT, N.Y.
Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times
Neil Selinger of Larchmont, N.Y., with his wife, Rima Grad.
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Even for the remaining hyperactive strivers who came out the winners in Darwin’s economy, it’s becoming a fleeting goal: Quit the job, slow down the engine, follow your passion.
So you can see what happened to Neil Selinger as a perverse Coen Brothers riff on the vanishing midlife dream — the rare winner who still, unfathomably, loses it all. Three years ago, he quit his job as a lawyer to write and do volunteer work. Now, two years after a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, he has deteriorated with heartbreaking speed from cane to walker to wheelchair, to puréed food, an inability to speak and almost total immobility.
You could find many confounding twists in Mr. Selinger’s journey, in its horror, but also in its grace — particularly the way friends, neighbors and fellow writers have supported him in ways that have rearranged his view of the world. So as he contemplates his unexpected detour off the main road and a book party in his honor on Sunday, what he sees is not what you might expect.
“As my muscles weakened, my writing became stronger,” he wrote recently in an unpublished essay. “As I slowly lost my speech, I gained my voice. As I diminished, I grew. As I lost so much, I finally started to find myself.”
Mr. Selinger grew up the quiet, bookish one in a 22-room compound in Matawan, N.J.: Sholom Aleichem meets J. D. Salinger. It served both as the headquarters of Sloan Products, the family’s wholesale paper and toy business, and as a Ponderosa-like home for four generations of bickering, feuding relatives, 13 people in all. With its mismatched décor, stone pillars, imitation Chinese lanterns, white clapboard and lime-green stucco foundation, it looked, he wrote, “like some sort of architecture experiment gone horribly wrong.”
Mr. Selinger retreated from the din by reading — first Chip Hilton and the Hardy Boys; then the World Book Encyclopedia, then Updike, Roth, Shakespeare and Hemingway. He went to Columbia University planning to study literature, but practicality won out and he went to law school. For 31 years, he had a successful career practicing securities law, suing corporations on behalf of shareholders.
He was, friends say, not just the driven lawyer who argued cases and examined witnesses in 75 cities, 34 states and 4 Canadian provinces. At home with his wife, Rima Grad, and his three daughters, now 17, 20 and 30, he cooked, coached, and made an art of scouring the Internet to plan family vacations.
In 2007, at age 54, he was able to pack it in. He tutored at the high school. He volunteered at a food pantry and for Habitat for Humanity. And most important, he signed up for a class at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, where he found not just his writing voice, but also a community of aspiring writers who met every other week for mutual support and feedback.
His new life did not last long. When he played basketball, he found himself stumbling and tripping for no reason. There was involuntary twitching in his arms and legs. In April 2009 came the diagnosis. Before long, the blur of ambition and energy of the man who ran a marathon and went to almost 200 Springsteen concerts began to wind down like a gizmo with a battery gone dry.
It was awful, of course, and, oddly, it wasn’t. The writing group eventually moved to his house. Friends and neighbors formed a group called FANS, Friends Around Neil Selinger, who cooked, drove, walked the dog, did what was needed. The quiet boy obsessed with writing became a quiet man who wrote; the busy house full of feuds and chaos was replaced decades later by the busy house full of friends, family and neighbors who just wanted to help. He found himself awed by the decency and generosity he experienced. He thinks often of a Springsteen song with the lyrics: “And should I fall behind, wait for me.” He is amazed that so many people have.
His writing teacher, Steve Lewis, said Mr. Selinger always had talent, he just had to lose that lawyer’s voice. But, Mr. Lewis said, as his disability has worsened, Mr. Selinger’s writing has sharpened and his sense of self deepened. “He’s got sort of a Zen countenance now,” Mr. Lewis said. “And it’s reflected in what he writes. He doesn’t duck anger and despair, he doesn’t duck anything, but it’s all there without self-pity. His writing is richer because his experience of the moment is richer.”
On Sunday, that moment will revolve around the result of Mr. Selinger’s work, a memoir, “A Sloan Product: A Memoir of a Lost Boy,” begun when he was healthy and finished in September when he could still type with one finger. There will be a reading and book party at the Larchmont Temple. Mr. Lewis and the five members of his writing group will read what Mr. Selinger cannot.
Meanwhile, Zen countenance intact, face weirdly aglow, Mr. Selinger continues to write. He composes pieces in his head and is learning to type them on a computer that responds to his gaze on the letters that appear on the screen. He stares and the words appear, first on the monitor and then aloud in the computer’s affectless voice. “In some ways, I am much happier,” he writes. “I appreciate simpler pleasures.”
E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com
