'Monk' returns for one 'Last Case' and it's a heaping serving of TV comfort food

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

I want to start by quoting how my guest, Christian Wiman, describes an essay he wrote back in 2007. He says it was about despair, losing the ability to write, falling in love, receiving a diagnosis of an incurable cancer, having my heart ripped apart by what slowly and in spite of all my modern secular instincts I learned to call God. The themes of cancer, enduring unendurable pain, living on the edge of death and searching for an understanding of God and faith have remained central to Wiman's essays and poems. That's reflected in some of his book titles. His 2013 memoir with poems is titled "My Bright Abyss: Meditation Of A Modern Believer." His new book is called "Zero At The Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair." It's part memoir and part a collection of his poems and poems by others related to the book's themes.

Wiman was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer when he turned 39. He's now 57. Over those nearly two decades, he's endured many rounds of chemo, a bone marrow transplant and several experimental therapies. He's in remission as of last spring.

He grew up in a small town in West Texas where everyone identified as Christian. His family belonged to an evangelical church. In college, he became a, quote, "ambivalent atheist" and in his late 30s started searching for God and the meaning of God. He teaches religion and literature at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. For 10 years, he was the editor of America's oldest poetry magazine, called POETRY magazine. He's the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Christian Wiman, welcome to FRESH AIR. And I'm so glad you're in remission. I assume you still are.

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: I am. Thanks for having me.

GROSS: Oh, you're so welcome. Your writing is really quite beautiful and with a lot of depth and feeling.

WIMAN: Thank you.

GROSS: I want to ask you not only the state of your health, but the state of your body now. I know there were times when you barely felt alive. You've been through so much over the past nearly two decades. What are you like physically now?

WIMAN: I'm pretty good now. I had a rough year. I - for about a full year, I was sick, and six months could - really had a hard time getting out of bed. But I had what's called CAR T therapy in the March of this year, and I'm a lot better now. It's taken a long time. I still deal with pain, but it's nothing like what it was.

GROSS: You thought you were going to die during that therapy, right?

WIMAN: I, first of all, thought I might not get the therapy. I was booted off the trial a couple of times and had a hard time getting in. And...

GROSS: It was an experimental drug.

WIMAN: It was an experimental trial, right. And, yeah, I thought I wouldn't see this book published. I had it finished, but I thought I wouldn't see it published.

GROSS: You have a description of the pain you were in in one of your earlier books, "My Bright Abyss," and you write about it so eloquently. I'd like you to read it.

WIMAN: Sure.

(Reading) Though I have in my life experienced gout, bladder stones, a botched bone marrow biopsy and various other screamable insults, until recently, I had no idea what pain was. It islands you. You sit there in your little skeletal constriction of self, of disappearing self, watching everyone you love, however steadfastly they may remain by your side, drift farther and farther away. There is too much cancer packed into my bone marrow, which is inflamed and expanding, creating pressure outward on the bones. Bones don't like to stretch, a doctor tells me. Indeed. It is in my legs mostly, but also up in one shoulder and in my face. It is a dull, devouring pain, as if the earth were already, but slowly, eating me. And then, with a wrong move or simply a shift in breath, it is a lightning strike of absolute feeling and absolute oblivion fused in one flash. Mornings I make my way out of bed very early and, after taking all the pain medicine I can take without dying, sit on the couch and try to make myself small by bending over and holding my ankles. And I pray - not to God, though, who also seems to have abandoned this island, but to the pain - that it ease up ever so little, that it let me breathe, that it not - but I know it will - get worse.

GROSS: And a little after that, you write basically that, you know, poetry is good for spiritual life. It doesn't really help with pain.

WIMAN: Right. Physical pain really does island you, like that passage says. It gives me a chill to read it now, to think of that. And, you know, in some ways, it's harder for the people around you. I think - as I was reading that, I was thinking of my wife, who's gone through all of this with me. And it's often, I think, worse for the person who's going through it.

GROSS: Your new book is subtitled "Fifty Entries Against Despair." There are many different kinds of despair. Describe the kind of despair you were in in the hospital when you were in the kind of pain you just described, thinking you could die.

WIMAN: In my experience, the worst despair is meaninglessness. It's not necessarily thinking that you're going to die. It's the feeling that life has been leached of meaning. And that's the worst. And physical pain actually doesn't bring that on. That can come on any time. In my experience, you can have physical pain and still experience joy. Joy can occur in the midst of great suffering. The kind of difference between joy and happiness - we're not happy in the midst of great suffering, but we can still experience these moments of joy. So, yeah, I think there are a couple of different kinds of despair. The despair that you feel in physical pain is not existential. It's remediable with drugs. When they don't work, and I've had periods when they don't work, then you really do fall into a kind of irremediable despair.

GROSS: Did the search for meaning while you were sick deepen your need for finding meaning in God and searching for God, for finding faith?

WIMAN: I think so, yeah. I think - I mean, people mock the fact that it takes a crisis to bring us to God. You know, they say there are no atheists in foxholes. Of course, there are plenty of atheists in foxholes. But the fact is, it takes a hell of a lot for us to change a coffee habit or something, and so to make an existential change in your life, you sometimes need to be really taken by the throat.

And for me, that actually happened when I fell in love and not necessarily when I got cancer. My wife and I actually started to pray shortly after we met each other. And it was a kind of haphazard, almost mocking, comical kind of prayer, but it gradually got more serious. And it was when I got sick that I needed a form for the faith, the inchoate faith that I was already feeling. So I went to church. And that's never really worked out for me very well - church - but it was the first step towards finding a form for faith.

GROSS: You met your wife about a year before you got sick.

WIMAN: I did, yeah. We met, and we were married within a year. And less than a year after we got married, yeah, I got a phone call telling me that I had that - this rare cancer.

GROSS: What's it called, the rare cancer you had?

WIMAN: It's called Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia. It's pretty rare, but really rare for a young person to get it. It mostly happens to people who are older. And as it happens, I have a particularly virulent form of it. It attacks me in ways that it doesn't usually attack people, and the kind of pain that I've had is not always consistent with Waldenstrom's, not even usually.

GROSS: You say one of the things that brought you back to Christianity was knowing - you know, in the Bible it says, Jesus on the cross said, God, why hath thou forsaken me? Did you feel forsaken when you were sick? Like, why was it that line that helped bring you back to Christianity?

WIMAN: You know, Simone Weil once said that if there were no resurrection, that that would be enough for her - the story of Jesus dying on the cross of God, suffering with us, of making suffering have a meaning, then - and a shared experience - then that would be enough for her. I know what she meant. I have felt rescued by that because in the deepest despair, as I say, is the absolute lack of meaning. It's not necessarily what's going to happen to you, although that can be part of it. But it's the fact that life doesn't have meaning. And in those moments, I think Christianity reaches into those moments. It doesn't provide an answer to them. It's simply a sense of shared experience, a sense that we are not alone.

GROSS: And that's enough?

WIMAN: Well, I mean, I wrote a whole book about despair, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

WIMAN: It's not 50 - yeah.

GROSS: Yeah (laughter).

WIMAN: So clearly, I keep getting stuck at the same place, but...

GROSS: But did you identify more with, like, Jesus suffered too, or even Jesus felt forsaken, as do I?

WIMAN: Oh, definitely felt forsaken. Yeah, definitely felt forsaken.

GROSS: Why turn to religion and not, say, for instance, philosophy? What did religion - what did faith give you that you felt nothing else could?

WIMAN: Oh, a living God. I mean, as - philosophy, there's nothing that loves you back. I mean, I am moved by my - probably my deepest settled belief is in the unity of existence, that things are - that there is some fundamental unity in all things. And we are part of that. And in our deepest experiences of joy or of love or suffering, there is a sense sometimes that reality is looking back at us. And it can happen to people who are not religious at all. They can have an - it happens to poets all the time. They can have an experience in nature in which they're not blending with nature. It's as if there's some kind of reciprocal seeing. And I think that is God. And that's the leap that I made in my life. I think a lot of people don't make that leap and perhaps don't feel the need to make that leap.

GROSS: So you don't envision God as a thing - I mean, like, a being, a physical being of any sort.

WIMAN: No, I don't. I don't picture God at all. I teach a poem by Shane McCrae the poet, who I think has been on here, on this show. And he's - he has a poem that says always I - when I picture the face of God, it's a white man's face. And I remember when I first read that and thinking, you know, I've never pictured God at all. I have absolutely no picture of God. And I don't think of God as an object at all. No, I find it more helpful to think of God as a verb.

GROSS: So you went from being brought up in the evangelical church, where the Bible is interpreted as the literal word of God, and now you've gone to what I think I can describe as the more mystical end of Christianity.

WIMAN: Yeah, I guess so. I don't consider myself a mystic. Though maybe we all are mystics and we just forget that as we grow out of childhood. Guy - someone met Wendell - one of my students met Wendell Berry the other day, and they were talking about me. And he said that when he read - he considered himself a forest Christian. But when he read my work, he really thought he was conventional. So that gave me great pleasure.

GROSS: So you grew up in the tradition of biblical literalism. In your memoirs, you quote poets and philosophers more than the Bible. What does the Bible mean to you now?

WIMAN: Yeah, I've wrestled with the Bible. Part of the problem is, you know, 30% of the Hebrew Bible is in poetry. And part of the problem for me is I'm never able to read it as poetry. I'm getting better at it. And mostly - probably it's because of the way that I was raised to - I think it's - it comes down to us as a set of doctrines, particularly in Christianity. You know, Christianity has been afflicted with theology. It's a theological religion. And I think that's largely a mistake. I love theology, but I think most of what Christianity ought to be is a poetic religion. It teaches us a way and gives us models of experiencing the world and not directions for how to be in the world. And I do love the Bible. I'm teaching a course on biblical poetry with a scholar here at Yale Divinity School, Jacqueline Vayntrub, next semester. And I - there are verses like Jesus' words on the cross that I feel completely rescued by.

GROSS: Is faith, for you, a way of dealing with mystery, with the mystery of life and existence and meaning and a way of living with that, knowing that there's not answers, but having faith? 'Cause there's a difference between, like, answers and faith, I think.

WIMAN: Absolutely. I mean, I think you can believe in God and not have faith. I think faith means living toward God in some way. And it's what you do in your life and how you live it. I don't feel the sense of mystery or terror alleviated by faith. I don't feel that at all. I don't understand when people present God as a answer to the predicament of existence. I just - I don't - that's not the way I experience at all. I have this hunger in me that is endless, and I think everyone probably has it. Maybe they find different ways of dealing with it, whether it's booze or excessive exercise or excessive art or whatever. I tried to answer it with poetry for years and hit a wall with that. And finally, I decided, or rather - I didn't decide. That's not right. I discovered that the only answer to that hunger was God. Answer is wrong, I guess. The only solution to me was to live toward God without an answer.

GROSS: Well, let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is poet and memoirist Christian Wiman, and his new book is called "Zero At The Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Christian Wiman. His new book is called "Zero At The Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair." It's about faith, illness and poetry. It's part memoir and part poems by Wiman and others.

How does your sense of faith now compare to how you were raised and your understanding of God then? - because when you were 12, you had an experience in church that people would describe as being born again or filled with the Holy Spirit.

WIMAN: Right. Yeah. You know, I was raised in that culture where - it was a literal understanding, and kids were expected to have a kind of conversion experience. I actually have a very funny story about that. When I was very young, about 7 years old, my father had - he had been selling Bibles and vacuum cleaners and stuff. And then he decided to change his life and go to medical school. And so we moved to Fort Worth, where he went to medical school. And we drove over to the First Baptist Church of Dallas on Sundays. I don't know why. It was the biggest Baptist church in the world, and it was huge.

And one Sunday, they made the altar call, when people are going down to get saved. And that church, a lot of people go down. They have a whole row of ministers to accept them. And I had written a little poem, which is, I love the Lord, and he loves me. I will not forget, and neither will he. Brilliant. And I folded it up and took it down there and gave it to the head minister. His name was Brother Criswell. And then I scurried back into my seat.

And that poem, as it turned out, was printed in the Southern Baptist newsletter. And so it's, like, my biggest publication - I think is enormous, and at 7 years old. And so you - it's - I love the story because it's - instead of presenting my soul at that moment, I presented a poem. And it's not like poetry was in our house or anything. I don't even know - I must have gotten that from hymns or something, you know, and - that little verse.

GROSS: Well, it's an affirming relationship with the church, too.

WIMAN: It is. Yeah. That's true. And - well, I guess, if you think the church is necessarily a part of God. I'm not always sure. I think people can...

GROSS: I should say God. I said the church.

(LAUGHTER)

WIMAN: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

GROSS: I mean, the - you know, the church published it.

WIMAN: That's true. Yeah.

GROSS: So - but what was your understanding of God then?

WIMAN: Well, I probably did have an understanding of God as a person in the sky, you know, or a vision of God as simply the answer to all questions, and also just a being a, like a father figure. And I suffered a real loss of that concept at some point, and to what I have now, which is God is really not an object at all, but a verb.

GROSS: So when you left the church and left the concept of God and became what you describe as an ambivalent atheist, was there anything that filled the void that was left by leaving the church? Was there a void?

WIMAN: Well, I turned to literature like a maniac. I mean, I was - I just was reading, you know, five hours a day and memorizing all these things and convinced that nothing mattered but being a great poet, and, yeah, that's what fill the void for 20 years. I mean, I - well, it never did it, but it certainly - I certainly tried to make it fill that void.

GROSS: We need to take another break here. So let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Christian Wiman. His new book is called "Zero At The Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair." We'll talk more about faith, illness and poetry after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Christian Wiman, a poet, essayist and memoirist. His new book, "Zero At The Bone," is part memoir, part a collection of poems by Wiman and others relating to the themes of faith, illness, suffering and the search for meaning.

He grew up in a small town in West Texas. His family attended an evangelical church. In college, Wiman became a, quote, "ambivalent atheist." In his late 30s, he discovered his own kind of faith and searched for God and for meaning. Within a year of starting to pray again, he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. That was nearly 20 years ago. After brutal rounds of chemo, a bone marrow transplant and several experimental therapies, living on the edge of death, he's been in remission since the spring.

In your memoirs "My Bright Abyss" and the new one, "Zero At The Bone," you have a lot of poems by you and by others. And one of the poems that you quote is by William Bronk, who I've never heard of, and even you hadn't heard of him until you were 53. But you describe it as the saddest poem you know. It's a very short poem, and I'd like you to read it.

WIMAN: Yeah. I'm so glad you mentioned Bronk 'cause nobody's heard of Bronk. And he's a fantastic poet - very particular poet, very particular sound. All of his poems have the same sound. And this is a late one called "The World."

(Reading) I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world. But no, there isn't an anchor anywhere. There isn't an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh, no. I thought you were. Oh, no. The drift of the world.

GROSS: I love that poem, and I want you to describe why you love it.

WIMAN: Well, it articulates a kind of sadness that probably we all experience in our life at some point. We think we've found some sort of anchor in the world, and that, too, is pulled away from us. I love the sound of it. I love the way it creates its effects with nothing but simple repetition. It's hard to realize this without having it in front of you, but in the opening line of that poem, there's an anchor, and then that anchor gets mentioned in the next two lines as well, and then it gets deleted in the third line. And the effect is if the anchor - you expect the anchor to appear there, but it doesn't, and it's as if it's been lifted up in that third line. So there's a paradoxical sense of levity in this poem so that it gives a - like a lot of poetry about despair, it gives a complicated feeling of despair and buoyancy.

You know, to write a poem is an act of faith. I don't - even the most stark poems of despair, like Philip Larkin's "Aubade," where he says, I work all day and get half-drunk at night. Waking at 4 to soundless dark, I stare - he talks about just facing death in that poem. Even a poem like that, I think, is an act toward life, is a movement toward life. And it's often why I don't really even understand the phrase secular poetry. People say that, and I think - 'cause I think that a lot of the what I think of as faith is carried on by poets who are not religious people, but the poems they write are acts of faith. And if the faith doesn't have an object for them, fine. It barely has an object for me much of the time. And so I find a lot of hope in poems like this by William Bronk, who certainly wasn't a religious person.

GROSS: Did you ever feel like God was your anchor and - you know, in the drift of the world, and then like, oh, no, there is no anchor?

WIMAN: Definitely. And that's exactly why I'm so moved by that - those - that line of Jesus on the cross. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Absolutely. I think that that - the sense of the void is an absolutely essential essence of Christianity. That's what that moment teaches us. That is an essential part of Christianity. Simone Weil says there are two atheisms of which one is a purification of God. What she means by that is that there's one kind of atheism that's just shallow and not worth bothering about. But then there's another kind that's quite serious and is actually part of the life of any person of faith. We have to purify ourselves of the God that's up in the sky and the God that is an object and the God that is an answer to all of life's questions.

GROSS: And live with the concept of God as mystery?

WIMAN: Yes. It doesn't mean mystery can't love you. Just as I was talking about the reciprocal seeing that we experience sometimes in nature, doesn't mean there's not love. But, yes, I think it is an essential mystery. You cannot pin it down.

GROSS: You know, you write that God doesn't help with pain. Poetry is for psychological, spiritual or emotional pain. For physical pain, everything but drugs is useless. So you had a lot of morphine, I guess, or opioids of various sorts.

WIMAN: Oh, yeah. Every kind of opioid - fentanyl and OxyContins and everything. You can take morphine. I don't really respond well to morphine, but yeah, that's what I've had.

GROSS: Did you have to go through withdrawal?

WIMAN: I did, yeah.

GROSS: How many times?

WIMAN: Twice. And I would say that was worse than chemo. That was shocking. Yeah, I went through it after the bone marrow transplant. You know, I thought I was done with suffering for a while and then had to go through that. It was really something.

GROSS: Did that give you an understanding of addiction?

WIMAN: It sure did, yeah. And there's a lot of addiction in my family. And I think people who think people can just - it's a matter of willpower to get off opioids are insane. I mean, the grip that that has on you is so intense.

GROSS: Your sister and your father were addicted to drugs. Was it heroin?

WIMAN: No, it was - my sister was addicted to meth, and my father was addicted to opioids, but not - he did do heroin, but he - that's not what he was addicted to. That was other opioids. Yeah. It killed my father. That's what he died of. My sister has beaten it and is living a good life now, free of that.

GROSS: Your sister did time in prison, and while she was there, she tried to end her life. She survived. I want you to read a passage from "Zero At The Bone" where she asks you about your experience living near death because of your cancer and all of the extreme treatments that you had to undergo. Could you read that for us?

WIMAN: Sure. This is right before my father died. I had visited them. They were living in a little residential hotel together in just a single room.

(Reading) We were almost finished with dinner when my sister asked me the same question she'd asked earlier in the prison, what it was like to live with death all the time, how one made it through one's days. The first time I'd been irritated, as I always am when someone brings up cancer when I'm not thinking about it. This time though, I was shocked. Surely if anyone knew what it was like to live with death all the time, it was she - the suicide attempts - and I have related only one - the hepatitis gnawing at her liver, the undifferentiated days enlivened and annihilated by mainlining little hits of death itself. I said, no one lives with death all the time any more than one lives with God all the time. I said, it goes away, that terror, that joy, when it isn't actually burning in your bones. I said some other useless sh**. As with her question to me in the prison, I couldn't take in the fact that she was asking, not out of curiosity, but risking a real despair and an immediate need. Somewhere in the ruins of her life - ash is how I callously describe it above - there was a spark still burning and seeking help.

My sister is an interesting person. She's a lively, dynamic person whose life got ruined by drugs, literally 30 years of it. And - but she has somehow found a way out. And she's much more outgoing than I am. She was, like, the one who made everybody laugh when we were kids and still does. She has recovered that. And so it really does seem like something of a miracle, her life.

GROSS: How did you answer her when she asked what it was like to live with death and how you made it through the days?

WIMAN: You know, I didn't do a good job there or in the prison. In the prison was even worse - I write about that too. I didn't do a good job answering her questions. We did - I think I just mumbled something about not thinking about it all the time. And the truth is, when death hangs over you for a while, you start to forget about it. You start to put it away and, also, you stop fearing it. I realized this time around, the only reason I was scared of death was my kids and my wife, of course. But for myself, that sort of visceral fear that I used to get of my own life ending, that visceral animal fear, I don't feel that at all. But I don't think I did a good job answering her question. And when she was in prison, we began to write letters to each other. And I tried to answer her questions more in the letters.

GROSS: You were kind of on - struggling with different things in opposite ways. You were struggling to live, being afflicted with cancer, and she was trying to die.

WIMAN: Yeah, I've never thought about it like that, but that's absolutely true. Yeah.

GROSS: We need to take a short break here. But first I want to say to all our listeners, if you're in a state of despair and need help, if you're considering harming yourself, you can get help at the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. All you need to do is text or call 988. The number again to text or call is 988. My guest is poet and memoirist Christian Wiman. His new book is called "Zero At The Bone: 50 Entries Against Despair." He teaches at Yale Divinity School. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF CYRUS CHESTNUT'S "LOVE ME TENDER")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Christian Wiman. His new book is called "Zero At The Bone: 50 Entries Against Despair," and it's about faith, illness and poetry. And he has had a rare form of cancer and is now in remission since the spring. He's had treatments for cancer for about nearly 20 years.

Now that you're in remission from cancer and you've been in remission since the spring, do you feel the presence of God as strongly as you did when you were suffering and living on the edge of death?

WIMAN: That's an interesting question. I guess yes and no. There's a way in which being at the edge of experience like that strips away all extraneous things. And two of my dear friends came and stayed with me at different times. One's a novelist in Chicago - his name's Naeem Murr - and one's a poet in Seattle, Emily Warn. And what I noticed - my experience with both those people during that time - I've known them for over 30 years - was we had very intense interactions that the illness clearly enabled. We were able to communicate in ways that we weren't usually. And I think of Christ's life as occurring in communion between people. And so for me, that was - I was - felt I was experiencing the life of Christ in those moments, though I should hasten to say that neither of those people are Christians at all. I think the life of Christ extends beyond Christianity. It precedes and exceeds Christianity.

And so there is a kind of urgency that that extremity enables. And I think - not necessarily communion with God, though, because I wrote in a journal the whole time that I was sick. And I noticed my entries are - some of them are despairing of feeling the presence of God. So, you know, I said yes and no. Yes, that time did create a space for that. But I have also felt lately a much more pacific and gentle sense of God's presence. And I found that to be a real gift, coming out of all that. And it has to do with my wife and kids as well.

GROSS: Have you asked your wife what your illness has been like for her? Has she talked to you about that? Because you got sick - you were diagnosed with this rare form of cancer about a year after you met. So it was very shortly after you got married that she had a very ill husband and lived through your illness with you while taking care of your twin daughters. And I know you say it's hard for the person who is the caregiver and the witness. Do you know what the experience was like for her and if it deepened her faith in ways similar to how it deepened yours?

WIMAN: We talk about these things all the time. Yes, I think that the experience that I've gone through has been something we've both gone through and has very much changed our sense of our relationship of God, what love means. I feel some guilt - I suppose everyone does - because her whole life for the last 20 years has been defined in some ways by this illness. Even when it's not weighing on us, it's sort of always there. Every decision we've had to make has been - we've had to plan for the fact if I couldn't be here. And it just always determines everything. And so I do - you know, I am very aware of that. And the faith that we have forged out of that is very much shared. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says famously, Christ is always stronger in our brother's heart than in our own, an idea which I love and I think is quite true. We always think someone else has more faith than we do. And I think part of my wife and my relationship is the way in which we reach toward each other to sustain our faith.

GROSS: Now that you're in remission, do you find that you're living your life differently, like you understand mortality in a way that you probably did not before you had cancer? - and that you're in remission but everyone is mortal. Do you feel like you're living your life differently?

WIMAN: First of all, yes. It has really changed the way I live my life. I live with a great deal more deliberativeness. I'm very aware of moments and very aware of the love that I have for my wife and kids and how lucky I am to have that. And that happens to me every day. I - and also of the love I have for God and how lucky I am to have that. I'm very deliberate about that as well. I do think that death is an abstraction for all of us until it isn't. There's that famous line from Wallace Stevens - death is the mother of beauty. Hence, from her alone shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires. What he means - that if you don't face the fact of death, then you can't recognize the full beauty of the world. Its very beauty is dependent upon its perishability. And when I was young, I really loved that notion.

But it's the - it is a notion that could only have been conceived by someone who's very young and for whom death is an abstraction. Because when it's right in your face, it can often be that the very opposite happens, that it becomes impossible to experience the world with intensity. Experience becomes leached of meaning because there's no futurity to it. And so I think that having come face to face with death - and, you know, I - this is an experimental treatment. I mean, I just - no one knows. It hasn't been around long enough for anyone to know how long it's going to last. It makes me live with a, as I said, a good deal more deliberateness and care.

GROSS: Christian Wiman, it's really been wonderful to talk with you. Thank you.

WIMAN: Thanks so much for having me, Terry. It's been great.

GROSS: Christian Wiman's new book is called "Zero At The Bone: 50 Entries Against Despair." He teaches at Yale Divinity School and the Yale School of Sacred Music. This is FRESH AIR.

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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. From 2002 to 2009, actor Tony Shalhoub starred on the USA Network series "Monk," playing Adrian Monk, a crime-solving detective with obsessive compulsive disorder. Now, after almost 15 years, Shalhoub and most of his original castmates are back in a new movie streaming on Peacock. It's called "Mr. Monk's Last Case." Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review.

DAVID BIANCULLI, BYLINE: The TV series "Monk," like its title character played by Tony Shalhoub, always stood out as being a little unusual. "Monk" was a detective series with a different murder to solve each episode. Yet like the classic TV series "Columbo," it not only focused on the particulars of its central mystery, but also took time to have fun with the quirky brilliance of its lead investigator. Also unusual, "Monk" was an hour-long police procedural. Yet despite some dark and dramatic moments, it played more like a comedy. In fact, the creator of "Monk," Andy Breckman, submitted "Monk" for Emmy consideration in the comedy categories. And competing against sitcom stars in the category of lead actor in a comedy series, Tony Shalhoub won the Emmy for his portrayal of Adrian Monk three times. And until "The Walking Dead" came along, the finale of "Monk" held the record as the most viewed scripted drama on cable television. In that last episode of "Monk" back in 2009, Adrian Monk finally cracked the case that had triggered his OCD compulsions, the unsolved murder of his wife, Trudy.

And now Andy Breckman has written a new movie sequel directed by Randy Zisk, revisiting the character after all this time. It's called "Mr. Monk's Last Case," and it begins by establishing how Adrian Monk has and hasn't moved on since we last saw him. We learn that Adrian retired from the crime-solving business and got a hefty cash advance to write a book about all the murders he'd solved. Unfortunately, Adrian's fears and compulsions didn't leave him, and while working obsessively on his memoirs, he became a relative recluse. The outbreak of COVID the past few years didn't help, but his stepdaughter Molly, a newly introduced character played by Caitlin McGee, did help. She moved in with Adrian during the pandemic and quickly became the most important person in his life. He was so grateful, he promised to use his book advance to pay for her impending wedding.

So as this new "Monk" movie begins, all seems fine, but not for long. Very quickly, there's a murder that Adrian Monk feels compelled to solve. And even before that, there's bad news when Adrian visits the office of his publisher. She's read the first several hundred pages of his manuscript and hates them. Adrian's attention to detail, which helps him solve crimes, apparently doesn't help so much when it comes to writing memoirs - not when he goes on and on for pages, for example, about how one murder suspect and he coincidentally used the exact same model of vacuum cleaner. The publisher, with her assistant in the room for backup, delivers the blow that she's rejecting Adrian's manuscript, and she demands he return the advance. It's not a verdict that Adrian takes well.

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TONY SHALHOUB: (As Adrian Monk) I'll do whatever you want. I'll rewrite the book.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) I'm sorry, Adrian. It's just too late. It's been 10 years. The name Adrian Monk used to mean something. It's a different world now. Everyone's moved on.

SHALHOUB: (As Adrian Monk) I have an idea. May I make a suggestion? You both leave the room, and someone different comes in and says different things to me.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) That's not going to happen.

SHALHOUB: (As Adrian Monk) How about this? You leave the room, and nobody comes back in ever.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) I think we're done here. Our lawyers will be in touch.

BIANCULLI: That concern voiced by the publisher, that people may not care as much about Monk after all these years, is a sly little nod to what this TV movie is facing. It's waited so long to reintroduce the character that it's a whole new world out here, reflected by the fact that "Mr. Monk's Last Case" is premiering not on cable but streaming on Peacock. But Adrian Monk and his cohorts do just fine in their 2023 return. Shalhoub slips back into the character with assurance and precision, nailing the comedy in each scene while making room for some somber tones of loss and depression.

This movie sequel, however, is anything but depressing. It's TV comfort food, and it's enjoyable to catch up not only with Adrian Monk, but with his castmates from the original series, all of whom are given some enjoyable scenes to play. The title of this new Peacock movie is "Mr. Monk's Last Case," but given how well its ingredients fold together, I wouldn't necessarily take that title literally.

GROSS: David Bianculli is professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed "Mr. Monk's Last Case." It's streaming on Peacock. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, New York Times reporter Charlie Savage will explain why a second Trump administration may be more radical than the first. Savage has reported on Trump's authoritarian leanings, his plans to expand executive power and the well-funded infrastructure that would support him. Savage covers national security and legal policy for the Times. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram @nprfreshair.

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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Ann Marie Baldonado, Therese Madden, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

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