Los Angeles Times film review – by Kevin Crust:

When a neurologist develops a second career as a bestselling author due to his talent for turning case studies into what he called “neurological novels,” it’s a wonderful twist to discover that the most fascinating life of all was his own. “Oliver Sacks: His Own Life,” Ric Burns’ majestic documentary, covers all eight decades of the unconventional physician’s life but is rooted in the final months before his death of cancer in 2015 at the age of 82.

Gathered in his New York home with friends and close colleagues just weeks after receiving his terminal diagnosis, Sacks regales us in his deep, British-accented voice about the ups and downs of his existence. He sounds like the happiest, most content man on the face of the Earth. It’s a marvel how he got to that point.

Partner Bill Hayes, longtime editor Kate Edgar, biographer Lawrence Weschler and others provide context and fill in the gaps. Much as Sacks chronicled the lives of his patients with tape recorders, cameras and Super-8, his own life was visually well-documented, and the film benefits.

In his memoirs, “Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood” and “On the Move: A Life,” Sacks was as inquisitive about his own brain as he was the world, and that detail plays out here. Though covering much of the same ground as the books, there is an alchemy at work in the documentary that delivers an added dimension.

His life had a most unusual shape. It went from bad to worse and then better to best. During World War II, young Sacks and his brother Michael were sent to boarding school, where they were bullied and beaten. Michael was later diagnosed as schizophrenic, which affected Oliver deeply.

Coming of age as a gay Jewish man in 1950s Britain was near impossible, and Oliver made his way to San Francisco (though not before his mother called him “an abomination” for his yet to be acted upon sexuality). He had begun weightlifting, hoping physical strength would translate into a less timid persona — it didn’t work, he admits.

In California, he led a dual life as Dr. Oliver by day and Wolf (his middle name), a burly leather-clad biker, by night. He was abusing amphetamines by this point and had his heart broken by a Navy man in Venice. Swearing off relationships but not the drugs, Sacks landed in New York City in 1965.

Getting nowhere in his career and realizing his self-destructive behavior was killing him, he began seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Leonard Shengold, who would treat him for the next 50 years. Sacks also began working directly with patients after striking out at research, and it changed his life.

It was a deep curiosity about human behavior and a desire to understand that led him to study afflictions such as autism, Tourette’s and encephalitis lethargica — the disease depicted in the book and movie “Awakenings” (which starred Robin Williams as a character loosely based on Sacks). Although he initially struggled with his writing, Sacks’ ability to translate his medical observations into literature allowed him to thrive. Many essays and bestselling books, including “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” followed.

In facing his demons, Sacks approached it as he did everything else, analytically, with great determination and empathy. He maintained his quirks and enthusiasms — a fascination with the periodic table, animals and nature, classical music, marathon swimming — while embracing an openness to new places and experiences, including finally finding love in his mid-70s with writer and photographer Hayes, after 35 years of celibacy.

“Oliver Sacks: His Own Life” is a moving portrait of a man taking deep stock of his life with great satisfaction and verve. It is, as Weschler says in the film, “a master class in how to die.” Sacks was an odd duck with a beautiful affinity for other odd ducks, and as an odd duck, I admire that.

Ric Burns’ new documentary film, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life explores the life and work of the legendary neurologist and storyteller, as he shares intimate details of his battles with drug addiction, homophobia, and a medical establishment that accepted his work only decades after the fact. Sacks, known for his literary works Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, was a fearless explorer of unknown cognitive worlds who helped redefine our understanding of the brain and mind, the diversity of human experience, and our shared humanity. The film features exclusive interviews with Sacks conducted just weeks after he received a terminal diagnosis, and months prior to his death in August 2015.

The film will be available for at-home streaming in the U.S. beginning September 23rd.

To get your ticket, go to KINO MARQUEE and select your theater, where you can buy a ticket that will provide access to the film virtually, beginning September 23rd. You’ll have to register for an account if you don’t already have one. After you’ve entered your payment information, your rental period will start immediately and last for five days. You can watch the film as many times as you want in those five days. You can watch on your computer, phone, or most tablets. All viewing methods require high bandwidth internet connection.

https://www.oliversacksdoc.com/

Delighted that the Amazon Book Review has selected How We Live Now as one of the “Best Books of the Month – Biographies & Memoirs” for September 2020. Many thanks. Amazon is also running this brief excerpt from the book.

Amazon Book Review editor Erin Kodicek writes: “I first fell in love with Bill Hayes’ work when I read Insomniac City. An affectionate and magnanimous memoir that pays tribute to Hayes’s relationship with the late, great Oliver Sacks, it also provides a paean to one of the other loves of his life: New York City. How We Live Now is a different kind of love letter to The Big Apple, one penned in the early days of the pandemic. Juxtaposed with eerily apocalyptic photos of empty streets and subway stations are other images and anecdotes that make Hayes such a needed chronicler of these uncertain times, because they reflect the resiliency and optimism that will help see us through it. Here is an excerpt:”

I bought lightweight leather gloves to wear for extra protection on the subway (I got workout gloves for the gym, too). I carried a small bottle of hand sanitizer with me. I’d never been a germophobe by any means, but, even when there were fewer than fifty Covid-related deaths reported in New York in early March, I had a feeling that subway cars, packed with straphangers and ideal vectors for viral transmission, were going to be places I’d want to avoid. (My first job in New York was working for a global nonprofit that was working on developing an AIDS vaccine; I’d learned a great deal about how viruses work and about human immunology and vaccinology.)

The last time I took a subway was on March 13. I was on my way to pick up some of my photographs, which I’d had printed and framed at a small business in Long Island City. I suppose I could have taken an Uber or cab, but why? The subway was cheap and fast, and stopped just two blocks from my destination. The rides back and forth to the frame shop were uneventful, but the mood inside the subway cars was tense. People were not yet wearing masks and only a few wore gloves like me, but everyone was doing their best to keep as far away from everyone else as possible. More people stood than sat, bunched together, for example—a rarity; you could practically get tackled for a spare seat in earlier times. This is not how New York, the New York I knew, operated.

I remembered being on an uptown 4/5 train one evening at the height of rush hour. If you have never been on an uptown 4/5 train at the height of rush hour, you can’t imagine just how jampacked it can get. The air you are breathing, the warmth you are feeling, the scent you are smelling, is not your own but a mix of everybody’s. Sometimes it is so crowded you can’t even grab a pole to hang on to; you remain wedged tightly among other riders, shoulder to shoulder, ass to ass. There’s no chance you’d fall over even if you wanted to.

On this particular evening, I am stuck in my least favorite spot: standing in the middle of a row, nowhere near either door, so getting myself out of here is going to be a polite-as-possible, but not too polite, push-and-shove maneuver. At least I am able to hang on to an overhead pole. The car is pretty quiet, which is typical—people generally keep to themselves on the subway—at least at first.

Suddenly, a young woman starts singing—she has headphones on—really singing, loudly. I can see her through the crowd. She faces the door, watches her reflection in the glass, and sings her heart out. She isn’t busking. I wonder if she is on her way to an audition, practicing her big number for a new Broadway show?

Suddenly, she stops. “I’m sorry for the noise!” she yells loudly enough for everyone in the entire car to hear.

All the passengers around her shake their heads, shrug: No, not noise.

“I’ve heard way worse,” the man next to me says.

*Photo credit: Bill Hayes

Thrilled to be featured in the latest issue of Italian Vogue, in a piece by photography critic Vince Aletti:

THIS IS NOT A FASHION PHOTOGRAPH – by Vince Aletti

“At the beginning of his new book, ‘How We Live Now,’ the New York-based writer and photographer Bill Hayes makes a long list of things he wants to remember – ordinary things that now seem forbidden, if not impossible. ‘The last time I shook hands with a stranger. The last time I went to the gym. …went swimming. …took the subway. …took a plane. …went to a movie. …kissed someone. …slept with someone. …shared a joint. …went to a restaurant. …shared an elevator without worrying. …wasn’t scared. …was as scared as this….’

“For anyone who’s lived through this terrifying, clarifying period, it’s a familiar list. As he did with ‘Insomniac City,’ his previous memoir with photographs, Hayes has a way of opening up the particularity of his experience to include us all. He began ‘How We Live Now,’ subtitled ‘Scenes From the Pandemic’ and available from Bloomsbury in August, when New York went into isolation in mid March. He capped it off with a postscript some 100 days later, when the city, on the brink of a very gradual reopening, was galvanized – and nearly paralyzed – by demonstrations against police violence.

“Whether he’s using a laptop or a camera, Hayes is a keen observer, alert to the pain, resilience, and wit of New York and New Yorkers. His book is largely anecdotal – part memoir, part journal – threaded with bulletins tracking a budding romance and inspired by something his late partner, author/neurologist Oliver Sacks, said shortly before he died in 2015: ‘The most we can do is write – intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively – about what it is like living in the world at this time.’ Hayes does just that while keeping it vividly, touchingly personal. He includes his to-do lists and his exercise routine (before noting that it was all but abandoned) as well as a sobering, day by day tally of the number of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S.

“What he calls, early on, ‘a disruption in the universe’ is manifest in ways large and small but mostly at street level, where Hayes continues to photograph and touch base with neighborhood shop keepers, some of whom had close calls with the virus. Although photographs of deserted streets and empty subway cars are familiar by now, his pictures of people are the emotional heart of the book. Images made before the pandemic remind us how casually we once hung out and clung together. But tenderness remains. The couple here, glimpsed at a local farmer’s market in April, their masks lowered for a kiss, are proof that, even as the city turned inward, love never shut down.”

– Vince Aletti for Vogue Italia

Vince Aletti is a photography critic and curator. He has been living and working in New York since 1967. A contributor to “Aperture”, “Artforum”, “Apartamento” and “Photograph”, he co-wrote “Avedon Fashion 1944-2000”, published by Harry N. Abrams in 2009, and is the author of “Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines”, published by Phaidon in 2019.

HOW WE LIVE NOW will be published in the U.S. on August 25th, and in the U.K. in November.  Further details to come.

Travel Journalism Begins at Home: PW Talks with Bill Hayes
By Daniel Lefferts | Jul 24, 2020

Writer and photographer Bill Hayes has a well-documented love of the Big Apple. His books include Insomniac City, a paean to New York and a memoir of his life with his late partner, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, and How New York Breaks Your Heart, a collection of street photographs featuring everyday New Yorkers. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the city, normally thronged with tourists, went quiet, and Hayes opted to chronicle the moment. In How We Live Now (Bloomsbury, Aug.), he mixes diaristic essays and photos, offering readers an armchair journey into what was, until recently, the heart of the pandemic. Hayes spoke with PW in June about capturing the city under lockdown.

You typically photograph people—did you find documenting a deserted city challenging?

In many ways I think it was really good for me as a photographer. I moved to New York 11 years ago, bought a good camera, taught myself how to use it, and began doing street photography. But after publishing How New York Breaks Your Heart, which is filled with street portraits, I sort of felt like I’d done so much of it. There was definitely something about this book that challenged me to do a new kind of street photography. As I ventured out in those early days, not finding people on the street to photograph like I was used to—it was very unsettling. There was a feeling of, “This is not the city I know.” But it caused me to look at the city in a different way, and find beauty in it, and find the sadness in it, and just capture it for what it is. I was almost doing a kind of landscape photography in the city.

With the city on lockdown, and fear of contagion running high, did you ever feel like you were taking a risk by stepping outside to shoot?

When I made this agreement with my editor and signed a contract, she made me promise—I held up my hand and promised—that I would keep safe. And I was. But even so, even before people were wearing masks, I could see the fear in their faces. Fear about what was happening, but also fear as I approached and introduced myself. There was that feeling in the air that made it much more intense than anything I’ve ever done. I found it eerie, and I also felt sort of lucky. I thought, “I’m so glad I got to see this, and that I can capture it for other people, who aren’t able to venture out of their homes and see what this is like.”

Why did you also include photos you’d taken before the pandemic?

Those pre-pandemic photographs are there to show what it was like as little as a year ago. A good example might be the photograph Girl in a White Dress, which was taken on Gay Pride Day almost a year ago. It’s a bunch of young kids on a stoop, clearly having a great time, coming from the parade. This year, that’s not going to happen. To me those photos are bittersweet, and remind us of what we’ve had, and hopefully what we can have again. I’m not completely hopeless.

(HOW WE LIVE NOW will be available in the U.S. on August 25, 2020)

Advance praise for How We Live Now: 

“This is a love story—for one particular man in the love affair that began as the pandemic did, for the city of New York and its people coping with an unanticipated catastrophe, for what words can do, for the light and darkness, shade and illumination of black and white street photography, for wandering and encountering and seeing, for being truly a citizen of the city and an inhabitant of the streets. Even at a moment when we were all supposed to withdraw from each other, HOW WE LIVE NOW reaches out.” — Rebecca Solnit

“Bill Hayes has unwrapped a New York under wraps during the lockdown. He is, in his photos and writings, the great poet of the everyday.” — Edmund White

Book Riot review – 6 of the Best New Books About Covid-19

“Author and photographer Bill Hayes captures raw and beautiful moments of the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. From deserted streets, shuttered restaurants, and other changes in this strange new world, he manages to find grace and gratitude. How We Live Now is a deep look at this unprecedented time we’re all living through together.”

Booklist review:

“Completed in early May of this year, Hayes’ (‘Insomniac City,’ 2017) latest is an achingly timely and moving portrait, in words and photographs, of New York City during the current global COVID-19 pandemic. Describing himself as “a loner and an introvert (except when it comes to strangers),” Hayes has long celebrated the beauty of New York and its people in his street photography (previously gathered in ‘How New York Breaks Your Heart,’ 2018). Interspersed among journal-like chapters, he shares new photos, some of which are before-and-afters: a busy, brake-lit 8th Avenue in December 2019, precedes a black-and-white image from the same vantage point, the street deserted, in April of this year; a June 2019 photo of a city stoop overflowing with Pride revelers is followed by a stark image of a woman sitting alone in March 2020. Mourning his and his city’s giant losses and expressing melancholy for what may never be again, Hayes also finds joy in surprising things, like cooking for himself and joining a “metaphorical bread line” outside his favorite bookshop, and in sweet, affectingly related memories.”

Shelf Awareness review:

Since early in the year 2020, experts and pundits have been desperate to make sense of the grand and sweeping ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic is rapidly shifting the world. What acclaimed New York City author and photographer Bill Hayes brings to the conversation with How We Live Now: Scenes from the Pandemic, however, is the same ground-level, impressionistic sensibility that made his memoir Insomniac City the tender and moving portrait it is, of living, loving and grieving.

“It’s strange,” he writes, “to try to retrace one’s steps, thinking about where you were at what point in this pandemic while still in the midst of this pandemic–and whether or not you’d ever been or put yourself at risk.” Living in isolation, limiting non-essential excursions outside the home, the days blur into weeks with little to distinguish them. Yet, somehow, Hayes pulls salient moments from the ether and infuses them with a resilience that might seem precious were it not bolstered by his clear-eyed perspective, having mourned two long-term partnerships and worked in AIDS awareness and prevention. His hope rises from the quotidian, which persists in his exchanges with people he photographs on sidewalks and in parks, in conversations with taxi drivers and store clerks, in the chants of Black Lives Matter marching through the city and in navigating new love once again. Threading essays together with journal entries and fine-art photography, How We Live Now is a wise and understanding companion for the lonely nights of catastrophe. –Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

Publishers Weekly review:

“In this somber reflection, author and photographer Hayes (Insomniac City) chronicles life in New York City during the Covid-19 pandemic. Hayes’s question perfectly sums up the times: ‘What if I looked out and saw no cars at all? Not one. As if every last person in Manhattan were taken by this pandemic, except for me, standing alone up here.’ Images of empty streets and subways, when juxtaposed with Hayes’s recollections—mostly of romances and amusing encounters with other New Yorkers—make for a startlingly potent contrast and show how abruptly life shifted from the pre-coronavirus world to the ‘new normal’ of today. Hayes captures acts of kindness during the pandemic: shopkeepers providing for their community, medical personnel on break or in training, and a woman making a mandala. The volume also provides an occasion for reflection, ‘In the enforced solitude and silence, you can sometimes hear yourself replaying moments in your life, things said or not said, done or not done, love expressed or not expressed, all the gratitude you’ve ever received, all the gratitude you’ve ever felt.’ Hayes’s photos movingly capture a fraught and frightening moment in history.”

The Washington Blade and LA Blade review:

One day in March, I went to the movies with a friend. I don’t remember what we saw. It was a lovely afternoon but it didn’t seem that meaningful. The next day, the Washington, D.C. area went into pandemic mode. Since then, my outing with my buddy seems momentous.

Everyone, I bet, has a memory from the Before Times etched in their DNA. As I write, a Washington Post news alert comes on my screen. The coronavirus has killed at least 1 million people worldwide, it says, “there is no end in sight.”

Yet, despite being sucker-punched by the pandemic, we keep going. “How We Live Now,” released on Aug. 25, by Bill Hayes, a New York City-based gay writer and street photographer, captures how we are going about our lives in the midst of our “new normal.” The slim volume is a time capsule and a memoir (in real time) of Hayes’ life during the pandemic.

Don’t be fooled by this book’s slimness. Its short chapters, interspersed with interludes of photos, pack a wallop of poignancy, beauty, love – even joy.

I don’t, thankfully, mean joy like a Hallmark Christmas movie. You know from the get-go that this won’t be a sappy book! It begins with an epigraph from “The Way We Live Now,” a 1986 short story by Susan Sontag. (Sontag, author of “Notes on Camp,” was the least sappy of writers.) Sontag wrote it at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The story doesn’t mention the word AIDS. Yet, it’s clear that it’s about how a group of friends feel about living in the midst of the epidemic (when no one is sure what causes AIDS).

“Of course, it was hard not to worry, everyone was worried,” Sontag writes, “but it wouldn’t do to panic…there wasn’t anything one could do except wait and hope, wait and start being careful, be careful and hope.”

Like many of us in the queer community, Hayes, 59, has been impacted by AIDS. Steve, his partner for 16 years, had AIDS. Ironically, he died from a heart attack. After Steve’s death, Hayes rebuilt his life. He continued to write and to take photographs. When you’re as good a non-fiction writer and as evocative a photographer as Hayes, what else would you do? He moved from San Francisco, where he’d lived with Steve, to New York City. There, some years later, he met, became friends with, then fell in love with renowned gay author and neurosurgeon Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015 at age 82.

Hayes, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, wrote “Insomniac City,” a moving memoir of his life with Sacks, his grief when Sacks dies and his transformation from an out-of-towner into a New York City denizen.

As was the case during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, people are having crushes, dating, having drinks with friends – during our COVID-19 era. Even in the face of loss, despair and death. Hayes falls in love on the Christmas before the pandemic began with Jesse, a young guy he met playing pool in a bar. “He was tall and muscular, but it was the Santa hat he wore with exactly the right amount of irony that caught my eyes,” Hayes writes. The two text and see each other a few times after the pandemic begins. Yet one of the last times they kissed was New Year’s Eve.

Hayes writes evocatively about everyday pandemic moments from having a drink (far apart from other patrons) at a bar to shouting your order to a clerk from outside a bookstore. His photographs vividly illustrate the difference between life in New York City before and after COVID. One eerie photo shows Eighth Avenue with no traffic.

One of the most trenchant chapters in the book is deceptively simple. It’s a list of the last time Hayes did everything from going to a movie to laughing before the pandemic. You might think, I could write this! But, you’d be wrong.

“How We Live Now” is a lively, bracing read for our time. – Kathi Wolfe

Texas Public Radio review:

Here we are six months into the COVID-19 pandemic and still, still, experiencing its assaults on our everyday lives.

Bill Hayes was in one of those heart-sinking moments a lot of us experienced in those early days in March when it became all too patently clear that how we were living was about to change dramatically.

In this slim volume, Hayes captures in real time the period from mid-March to June when New York City was slowly morphing into an apocalyptic ghost town. In photographs and short vignettes, he documents the changing landscape, ephemeral moments with other New Yorkers in restaurants newly outfitted for takeaway service only, on subways, in parks, and city streets where the usual throngs have vanished.

Here and there, he encounters denizens of the metropolis that make up the black-and-white street portraiture interspersed in the book. In one, a young girl arranges what look like magnolia petals to create a mandala. She tells Hayes she doesn’t know why she is making it, just that she always has made them. She always has — even before the pandemic. It’s a stunning moment to think that the blight did not affect her art did not prevent her from making more of it.

Hayes wants to tell her that she is “making a whole universe out of what would otherwise go underfoot, unnoticed… a different universe from the one we are currently inhabiting.”

She lets him add a stripped twig to her work. When he goes to scour the ground for it, he has to concentrate and focus to find something. The impromptu exercise has forced him to defamiliarize the tiniest natural element — to really see it and appreciate it — in spite of what else is going on all around him.

A photograph of the mandala-in-progress with the shyly smiling woman in the background is interspersed with other photographs of New Yorkers. At first, none of the subjects is wearing a mask. As you move through the pages, nearly everyone wears one.

This book is a long love letter to New York, to a city not many of us can imagine shuttered to the point of desolation. The book also includes a love story — one that began for Hayes in late December 2019, a few months before the springtime first wave devastated the country, the world.

And another love story — about Hayes’ long-time partner, Oliver Sacks, the world-renowned neurologist, naturalist, historian and author.

Sacks had “treated survivors of the encephalitis lethargica pandemic that swept the world in the early twentieth century, killing or incapacitating five million people.”

From him, Hayes learned the imperative to write. Hayes shares that one evening in 2015, a few months before he died, Sacks looked up from his work and said to Hayes: “The most we can do is write — intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively — about what it is like living in the world at this time.”

Hayes is the author of “Insomniac City” and “The Anatomist,” as well a collection of street photography, “How New York Breaks Your Heart.”

In some ways, this new book could be titled, “How New York Puts the Pieces Back Together Again,” as we see the ways — with numberless implications — that New Yorkers have adapted to the pandemic crisis. Certainly, Hayes documents enough of them to restore a sense of hopefulness about what is yet to come and the ways we must continue to alter our lives for the sake of survival.

Hayes recounts moving exchanges with those who had heretofore made up his daily life — waiters and barbers, pharmacists and UPS delivery drivers — and so many others who keep the city that never sleeps awake and alive, bustling and thriving. We read about the ways they keep on, masked and socially distanced from life as they knew it.

The 51st chapter in the book of short vignettes features a list of confirmed pandemic cases and deaths in the United States, starting with day 57 and going backward to day one.

May 7 was months ago now, and the numbers have grown to staggering and inconceivable totals.

Although Hayes’ accounting of the pandemic ends in May, he offers an early June postscript.

Because the streets of New York were largely empty, by the early summer, Hayes could hear birds singing and trees rustling, sounds that pre-pandemic were drowned out by the hustle and bustle of an ordinary day in New York City. But now the sounds were drowned out by something else — the chants of protesters in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.

Hayes grabs his camera and his facemask and hand sanitizer and heads out before the curfew.

This afterword in this collection of photographs and brief chronicles is a poignant reminder that no matter what else happens to us as a community, city or country, this is “how we live now.” – Yvette Benevides

Philadelphia Gay News

Out gay author and photographer Bill Hayes’ eloquent and elegant new book, “How We Live Now,” is subtitled, “Scenes from the Pandemic.” Hayes provides “snapshots” of life during COVID both in prose and in black and white street photos. (Check out his Instagram for additional images, including ones from the book in color).

His slim volume can — and perhaps should — be read in one sitting. But readers also may feel like they should wear PPE while holding it. “How We Live Now” is delicate both in its prose and content. Hayes’ writing is crisp, and several chapters are poetic. (None are more than a few pages).The thoughts expressed in the short, snappy vignettes are reflections on life during lockdown. Hayes’ tone is elegiac, but he holds the reader’s hand through what he (and most everyone) is enduring during these uncertain times. This is not a survival guide — though to an extent it is; it is more like an undated diary, where days bleed into one another. He writes out an exercise regimen on March 18, 2020 and 25 pages later, he acknowledges a lack of motivation to exercise. Only nine days have passed.

Hayes misses the gym, and swimming. He is bored and restless in his solitude and living alone. (His husband, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, died in 2015). One of the first chapters is a list of 41 things he used to do, from “shaking hands with a stranger” to “falling in love.” This entry provides an ersatz table of contents as “How We Live Now” recounts Hayes’ thoughts and experiences about simple things like riding a subway, kissing someone, going out for a drink, or getting a haircut.

He mixes personal stories with observations. The approach works, because much of what Hayes writes is universal. He recounts the moment last Christmas when he met Jesse, his lover, in a bar and took him home. He reveals his weakness for Jesse’s gap-toothed smile and writes about kissing and kissing and kissing Jesse on New Year’s Eve.

Readers may be disappointed that Hayes does not include an image of Jesse, but then, several pages later, he does. It is an arty black-and-white nude entitled, “The Last Time I Kissed a Man,” dated March 14, 2020, 1:44 p.m. The gap-toothed smile is hidden under a pillow. The fact that such intimacy may not be recaptured for a long time is potent because their nascent romance is arrested by the virus. Despite a weak moment where they meet in person after lockdown, most of Hayes’ exchanges with Jesse are conducted via text or at a social distance. Hayes bemoans celibacy, and that he no longer needs to take PrEP. He longs for touch and human contact.

“How We Live Now” provides other impressions of life during quarantine. Hayes chronicles the eerie, enforced silence of New York City, documenting the change as Manhattan feels like “everyone has gone missing.” Whereas the subways have throngs of riders wedged tightly, “shoulder to shoulder, ass to ass,” he includes a photo of the “L Train at Rush Hour” at 5:05 pm, April 22. It is as empty as his photo of 8th Avenue on April 6.

Hayes writes briefly about depression, and he could have expanded more on that topic. His observation, “The most important thing I’ve learned about depression is not to think about it as ‘a depression,’ as if it were a single monolithic thing,” is practical, useful, but also vague. It would have been interesting to know more about how he coped with the bouts of loneliness under lockdown.

The book suggests he took walks, and met people, from a woman arranging a mandala, to a trio of residents in anesthesiology at NYU Medical Center, who all had COVID, sitting on a stoop, to the clerk at a local liquor store, who signs Hayes’ credit card in an amusing fashion. These are “New York moments,” and “How We Live Now” is full of similar enchanting stories. Hayes recounts having an illicit drink at a restaurant with the owner, Joe, when he swings by to pick up a food order. He hears a story from a friend who was kindly offered a tissue by a passing car, and he describes the response by his neighbor and doorman to prevent a naked man outside their building from being hit by a car or put in jail.

What emerges in these and other scenes is solidarity and humanity. Hayes is kind to a teacher from Philadelphia who inadvertently calls him. He gives money to Raheem, a homeless man he knows. And he reaches out and renews friendships.

A thread throughout “How We Live Now” is about chances taken and regrets for things not done. This provides the book’s most poignant, salient theme. Hayes describes taking a photo of a man he met on a subway, pre-COVID. The stranger tells Hayes he agreed to pose, “Because I never do things like this.” Hayes’ book offers hope that we can experience such random, pleasurable moments of connection again soon.

“A portrait of the poetic neurologist of ‘Awakenings,’ shot at the end of his life, takes a tender and thrilling look at the sacred demons that drove him…”

Review by Owen Gleiberman for “The Hollywood Reporter”

The title of the new documentary “Oliver Sacks: His Own Life” bounces off the title of the essay that Sacks published in The New York Times on Feb. 19, 2015 (“My Own Life”), days after he’d received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. (He died on Aug. 30, 2015.) It‘s a deceptively plain title. For Sacks, in his impish way, was suggesting that his own life, if you looked at it closely enough, might bear more than a passing resemblance to the idiosyncratic and richly freakish lives he chronicled in his case-study portraits that were really a form of wide-eyed literary biography.

Sacks wrote about people in extreme states — of sensory and neurological damage, of awareness and sheer being. And “Oliver Sacks: His Own Life,” directed by the redoubtable Ric Burns (“Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film”), is a portrait at once tender and thrilling, a movie that presents us with a man who led an eccentrically defiant, at times reckless existence that was the furthest thing from cunningly planned. He was a wanderer in the body of a clinician, like Jack Kerouac crossed with Jonas Salk. He was that rare if not unique thing, a scientific navigator of the soul.

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This is very nice: The latest episode of the BBC radio program “GREAT LIVES” profiles Oliver Sacks. I was honored to join the Irish neurologist & author Suzanne O’Sullivan to discuss his life and career. The biggest highlight: several very well chosen clips from the BBC archives of Oliver himself, including a wonderful bit with him reading from “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” 30 minutes long.