After suffering a stroke, and the symptoms escalating to locked-in syndrome, Jean-Dominique Bauby spends the rest of his short life being cared for in a hospital. His only escape are trips outside of his room via wheelchair transportation, and his own imagination. Though his body fails to move and he cannot speak, he has his own way of communicating by blinking his eye and corresponding it to letters and meanings of things that he wants and needs - which is how this book is written.

Jean shares his experiences of what he's going through, mostly describing places and people that he visits and reconnects with in his mind. His prose is short and to the point, yet contain a sharp tone of his senses, memories, and dreams/nightmares - unrealized hopes of jumping out of bed and moving like he used to only to be reminded of his stark 'reality'. Like a butterfly moving from flower to flower, fluttering through the world, Jean's stories are short in length but paint in-depth pictures of life as he grazes through it.

I think more than any other book genre, we can go into memoirs with the unrealized expectation that the author is supposed to teach us something profound - whatever trauma or success they experienced, we hope to glean something from it that we can take away into our own lives. With The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, most memoir reviews contain a heavy emphasis of this not being in-depth, personal, or effective as other memoirs. For me, sometimes the best-taught memoirs are the ones that simply remind us of what it means to be human, how our bodies work in their own ways, and that we find a way to survive even when our bodies seem to be working against us.