Life Itself: film critic Roger Ebert turns the lens on himself

More a collection of essays than a memoir, Roger Ebert stares down adversity to reveal his undiminished zest for life.

Last year, Esquire magazine ran a photograph of Roger Ebert. Unlike many of the images in that glossy men's monthly, it was not particularly titillating - no dewy-eyed starlet, or supermodel. It was the face of a man who had lost a good portion of his lower jaw to cancer, and the surgeries intended to repair the damage wrought by that cancer. Ebert, his eyes still twinkling with mirth, gazes out unhesitatingly, not challenging people to stare so much as expecting them to. "Nobody had seen me quite that way before," Ebert observes of the photograph, which accompanied a lovely, heartfelt story by Chris Jones. "Not a lovely sight. But then I'm not a lovely sight, and in a moment I thought, what the hell, it's just as well it's out there."

Like Tony Judt, another writer and public figure stricken unexpectedly by illness, Ebert has become as famous for the disease that waylaid him as the work that made his name. Before his death in August 2010, Judt wrote a moving memoir, The Memory Chalet, in which he described storing his most precious memories in the rooms of a ski resort fondly remembered from youth as a means of staving off the night-time terrors of being rendered immobile, and sleepless, by Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

Ebert, no longer able to eat, drink or speak, has also found comfort in his own stable of treasured moments: "In these years after my illness, when I can no longer speak and am set aside from the daily flow, I live more in my memory and discover that a great many things are safely stored away."

Ebert, thankfully, is still very much alive and well after surviving thyroid cancer, and his illness has prompted an unexpected second act. With 548,049 followers (and counting) on Twitter and a substantial following for his blog (where much of this book originated), Ebert has reinvented himself as a permanent denizen of the internet. Rather than turning away from his work, he has renewed his devotion to movies, and to his readers, discovering entirely new ways of communicating with film buffs everywhere.

What happens when a critic, so used to writing about others, begins to write about himself? As a man of images, it is perhaps appropriate that Ebert be most associated with two particularly indelible ones: the man in the balcony, giving the thumbs up (or down); and the man of many opinions, rendered voiceless. Ebert's book is clearly prompted by his new-found Twitter popularity and the public interest generated by the Esquire profile, and yet Life Itself is hardly the cancer memoir we might have expected.

To begin with, it is hardly a memoir at all. Much of the material here originated as posts on Ebert's blog, and Life Itself still feels like a collection of discrete essays, for better and for worse.

Repetition of material from chapter to chapter is rife and some of the subject matter here seems to have little place in a book subtitled A Memoir. Nor is it much about Ebert's condition; those interested in reading only about his illness and recovery are advised to skip to the final 50 pages of the book. But doing so would mean missing out on some of the most enjoyable parts of Life Itself, which is far more about life, and Ebert's undiminished pleasure in living it, than sickness and death.

Life Itself is a full-service book. Those interested in learning the complete - and I do mean complete - lineage of Ebert's extended family will have their curiosity fully satiated. If you need a tip on where to stay in London, Ebert's got that covered (although the hotel itself is now closed). He settles the rumours that he once dated Oprah Winfrey (nope). And he offers more than you ever knew, or possibly ever wanted to know, about the glories of Midwestern hamburger chain Steak 'n Shake.

But Ebert, trained by a lifetime at the movies, is an expert observer, and even the reminiscences of youthful burgers bring him back, inevitably, to his childhood. Remembering the taste of Steak 'n Shake's hot sauce, he remembers of his father that "he liked to dash it on his Chili 3-Way. I would watch in awe as he sprinkled it on and took his first bite. He would glance at me sideways and elevate his eyebrows a fraction. You see why, as a film critic, I am so alert to the nuances of actors."

Moreover, Ebert's memories of food are just that: memories. Since his last, unsuccessful surgery, he can no longer eat or drink, and his odes to Steak 'n Shake and favourite Venetian trattorias are the fond recollections of a vanished Arcadia. Meals were indelibly linked with conversation, and their loss spells the end of a kind of passionate exchange of ideas that Ebert now finds on the internet: "Maybe that's why writing has become so important to me. You don't realise it, but we're at dinner right now."

Ebert can be breathtakingly casual about his condition ("and although I can no longer eat," he says of one favourite establishment, "Cafe Bernard is still there, almost 40 years later"), but more than that, he is simply less interested in his own trials than in the world around him. Even a cursory mention of his ailments brings him back to the movies: "I may seem tragic to you, but I seem fortunate to myself. Don't lose any sleep over me. I am so much a movie-lover that I can imagine a certain small pleasure in looking like the Phantom." Being the film critic he is, he goes on to clarify that he is thinking of Lon Chaney from the 1925 silent classic, and decidedly not Gerard Butler from the inferior 2004 remake.

Taken as a whole, the entirety of Life Itself is something of a hodgepodge, encompassing profiles of favourite performers such as Lee Marvin and John Wayne, recaps of his annual trip to the Cannes Film Festival and a sweet tribute to his wife, Chaz, who helped nurse him through his illness. The structure of the book is somewhat careless, with an opening segment on Ebert's childhood and a closing one on his illness bookending a flabby middle of autobiography, film criticism and social history. The chapters devoted to his encounters with favoured filmmakers and actors are charming, but their presence here is questionable at best.

Life Itself's saving grace is Ebert's plain-spoken writing style, which manages to entertain, and occasionally educate, without ever drawing attention to itself. As far as Ebert knows - or admits - it comes naturally to him: "My reviews from 1967 are written in roughly the same voice as my new ones. I've always written in the same style, which seems to emerge without great pondering." Never a great stylist, or a devotee of a particular school of criticism, Ebert has become America's most popular film critic in part because of the bully pulpit of television, and in part because of his desire to speak directly to readers.

"Focus on what you saw and how it affected you," he says of his response to the movies he sees. "Don't fake it."

Ebert was the right man in the right place, getting his job at the Chicago Sun-Times the same year that Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate were released, and that Pauline Kael became film critic of the New Yorker magazine. But he has retained his position by staying true to Robert Warshow's dictum, which he approvingly quotes here: "A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man."

The book is also buoyed by Ebert's disarming honesty, born of his close encounter with death. With his mortality in clear sight, any hesitation he might have felt to discuss uncomfortable topics, like his alcoholism or his mother's stranglehold on his romantic life, has evaporated.

Ebert can no longer speak, but writing - both the retelling of his life story here and the torrent of words he unleashes daily online - has sustained his connection with the world he almost lost. Having only words on a page to communicate, the value of each word has skyrocketed: "It's so hard for me to express myself that I've become aware of the words ordinary people waste." Ebert, it turns out, is just as plain-spoken about death as he has been about The Godfather: "My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris."

Saul Austerlitz is the author of Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy.