 As a student at the School of General Studies (GS), Joe Connelly wrote the novel "Bringing Out the Dead," (Knopf, 1998) about a paramedic on the brink of a breakdown. A scant two years after finishing the book, Connelly got what many writers only dream of: the chance to see his own work on the big screen.
Last week, the movie version of the novel, directed by the legendary Martin Scorsese and starring Nicholas Cage, Patricia Arquette and John Goodman, opened to rave reviews. Below, Connelly talks about his life as a paramedic, and how his book came to be.
From the moment he climbed into the back of the ambulance, Joe Connelly knew he had to write a book. There were so many eccentric characters - some of them too strange even for fiction. There were Jesus-crazed paramedics who tried to get dying patients to confess their sins. There were overworked nurses and exhausted doctors.
Ultimately, though, Connelly says he wrote down his experiences as a way of memorializing the patients he couldn't save. Throughout the novel, people keep asking the main character, Frank Pierce, "What's the worst thing you've ever seen?" and Frank always quips, "Lima beans on pizza." But in real life, Connelly is much less glib about his experiences. He's seen gruesome, devastating things but says that oddly enough, the least bloody days on the job are often the most affecting.
"Sometimes it's the little details that get you, like the eyes of a child watching her mother die," he said. "These are the kind of details that ask you to be a writer."
He said one of the reasons he felt so strongly about setting his experiences down was that he saw so many people die who had no one to remember them afterwards. "I really started writing the book as a way of saving lives," he said.
Write them down he did, crafting the book in a series of classes he took at the School of General Studies. Connelly said his book is a "composite" of the calls he's answered. There's the man he shocked back to life, whose family then complained afterward their gentle old father had suddenly turned belligerent and nasty. There's the woman with Alzheimer's who called 911 every night, thinking her husband had stopped breathing, having forgotten he had died years ago. There is the man who fell asleep on the subway platform and rolled onto the tracks.
In the novel, Frank Pierce is down-and-out - heartbroken (his wife has left him), depressed (too many of his patients have died of late) and unable to quit the ambulance life he's come to despise. "You can't quit when you're down like that," Connelly said, adding that the character he created is an extreme example of himself, of what would have happened to him had he not been able to train himself to leave his work behind at the end of the shift.
"I wanted to push him out there," Connelly says of his character. "I wanted somebody who had no defenses."
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