Novelist Julian Barnes Faces Mortality Without Fear

This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. My guest is the critically acclaimed best-selling author Julian Barnes. He was diagnosed six years ago with a rare form of blood cancer, but it's not a death sentence, it's treatable, which means he'll be on a chemo drug for the rest of his life. His eightieth birthday is Monday.

Tuesday is the publication date of his new book, which he says will be his last. It's called Departures. It's part memoir, part fiction. The memoir sections are about his diagnosis and his reflections on death, why he's agnostic, the power and unreliability of memory, and how his memory has been diminishing with age. In a way, his new book is a companion to his book Levels of Life, which was in part about grief and

and the death of his wife, Pat Kavanaugh, who was also his literary agent. She died in 2008, just 37 days after being diagnosed with a rare hyperaggressive brain tumor. They'd been married about 30 years. The New York Times Review described the book as shattering. Barnes won Britain's highest literary award, the Mann Booker Prize, in 2011 for his novel The Sense of an Ending.

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