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 On Already Missing The Angry, Passionate Writing Of David Rakoff 
 
 i i itoggle caption Larry Busacca/Getty Images Larry Busacca/Getty Images 
 
 Being funny, unashamedly angry, and deeply human is something a large number of people try and a relatively small number of people do well. One of the people I've always thought did it well was David Rakoff, who has died so very much too young — at 47 — most likely as a result of the tumor he announced he was battling in 2010, though details haven't emerged. As he told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, he learned he had this particular cancer while writing Half Empty, his book about pessimism. 
 
 Many of you probably know Rakoff primarily as a contributor to This American Life, where he's been storytelling since 1996. Fortunately, his work there is helpfully gathered on his contributor page, and you can sit and listen to all of it. You could do far worse things with your day. 
 
 Rakoff was an actor as well — I remember realizing suddenly, as I watched the Oscar-winning short film The New Tenants, that one of the leads was David Rakoff. That same David Rakoff, who I knew from This American Life, who wrote Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems, an essay collection I'd happily flipped through at some point or another. 
 
 In the live show This American Life presented this spring, Rakoff talked about losing the use of his arm after surgery brought about by his tumor. He opened by talking about the portent of saying "Hey, watch this," as he did in a dream where he simply raised that "flail limb" — which he could no longer do. He went on to describe the changes in his routine: taking a shower, grating cheese, everything that was harder now. "Always, always, always have your bum hand safely out of the way," he noted, cautioning that otherwise, you might "cook [it] on the stove without even knowing it." 
 
 The audience laughed, a little, but they weren't sure. 
 
 He talked about being at a dinner with friends who longed for more in their lives. They wanted more fulfillment, less disengagement, more wholeness in various abstract, high-minded ways. And he compared it to being at dinner with triathletes when you have no legs. He detailed how being ill had changed him, how he wondered whether he could dance anymore. He wasn't sure. The rest, I encourage you to listen to for yourself, right through to the music: What'll I do with only dreams of you? 
 
 Rakoff was a practitioner of a kind of writing that can sometimes seem to have become ubiquitous somewhere between Usenet and Twitter, because everyone thinks they can do it: blistering, unforgiving, yes-I-said-it cultural criticism, dark and mad. But with Rakoff, everything bounced off a deeply human way of looking at other people — after all, it's only that humanity that makes your anger and your melancholy mean anything. Who cares if you can't dance if you wouldn't want to because hey, the hell with dancing? Who cares whether you despair for your society if you don't like anybody anyway? 
 
 David Rakoff was, for me, the antithesis of the empty and unsatisfying fascination with some kind of centimeter-deep "keeping it real." That, it turns out, is not mushy, gushy, sunshine-y insistence that everything is great. (His most recent book was about his commitment to pessimism, after all.) It's your own version of brutal truth that comes from engaging with the world rather than refusing to engage with it; from entering it and disrupting it as needed rather than standing outside of everything throwing rocks. 
 
 It's such a false choice, Fake vs. Mean. For one thing, you can be fake and mean — it happens all the time. But, like David Rakoff, you can also be genuine and enraged and passionate about the whole of humanity, even when (especially when) it disappoints and maddens and angers you. 
 
 When writers die, I'm always drawn to remembrances that are baldly loving and personal: Dan Savage, "Devastated." Starlee Kine, saying simply, "David." But for me, the sadness is undeniably selfish. I miss the maybe 30 more years of writing I somehow feel I was entitled to read and hear. I see it in my mind fading from printed pages, and I simply miss it. 
 
 Programming note: Fresh Air ran a special show today remembering David Rakoff. 

 I am nothing if not compliant. I held still as I was shuttled back and forth through the wondrous high-tech doughnut, inhaling and holding my breath when instructed. Less than three minutes later, I hopped off the narrow table and put my sweater back on. 
 
 “Have a fantastic day,” the technician said as I left. 
 
 “Fantastic”? Fantastic days are what you wish upon those who have so few sunrises left, those whose lungs are so lesion-spangled with new cancer that they should be embracing as much life as they can. Time’s a- wasting , go out and have yourself a fantastic day! 
 
 Fantastic days are for goners. Was I fated to take some final vacation to see Venice for the first and last time? Or should I corral some long-cherished idol (I’m talkin’ to you, Meryl Streep ) into posing for a photograph with me, both of us giving a thumbs up to the camera before she beats a hasty retreat back to the Land of the Living? That kind of fantastic day? 
 
 In truth, after close to three years into my current illness — a rather tenacious sarcoma around the area of my left collarbone — I try not to invest too much importance in the casual words of others, mostly to let them off the hook. With the exception of the wildly unprofessional X-ray technician in 1988 who, spying my radiation-strafed lungs (a result of the primitive treatment for my first bout of cancer, and the likely cause of my present sarcoma), asked how long I’d had AIDS , caregivers seem trained to keep their language and voices neutral, for just this reason: it’s an unfair burden on them when so many of us who are sick are looking for signs or unstated reasons to hope during the waiting. 
 
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 And there will always be waiting. It begins immediately. Unless your presenting problem is a headache and you show up at the hospital with a knife sticking out of your skull, tests will always have to be done and then results will have to be delivered. Biopsies must be frozen, sliced, dyed and analyzed. If a culture has to be grown, then you have to bide your time while cell division takes its course. Disparate hospital departments, if not entirely disparate hospitals , cities or states will have to find and speak to one another, leaving you with nothing but a lump, inexplicable bruising, months of unexplained fatigue, your own imagination or, heaven forbid, the Internet to occupy your mind. Those weeks before diagnosis can be among the most torturous times. There is a reason you’re called a patient once the plastic bracelet goes on. 
 
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 Sometimes culture doesn’t help. Just as I sat down to write a few notes about something else, I learned that the writer and performer David Rakoff died last night, after a long struggle with cancer. I only knew David in the way some writers know one another in New York: at parties, across lecture halls. Our lengthiest conversations took place at a New Year’s party we attended each year. Once I ran into him at a performance of “Other Desert Cities,” and his e-mail to me about the production made me laugh so hard that there was no point in reviewing it. 
 
 But before all that, I met David at Columbia, when it was an all-boys school. We were both students then. This was in the early-to-mid nineteen-eighties, and to say that gay men were interested in, and terrified of, one another back then is to reduce the horror of the time: AIDS , parents checking out on their ill children, fear and loathing of other male bodies mixed in with desire. Back then, I stayed away from David, because of the sadness I saw in his eyes; I didn’t think I could take it. His sadness felt like the sadness I felt wandering through a world of broken bodies, dashed hopes, possibilities extinguished. 
 
 Years later, I was re-introduced to David by a colleague at The New Yorker. His eyes were different: the world had taken some note of his gifts, and there was a light behind the sadness. One felt he couldn’t believe his good fortune, that people actually liked his writing, and everything that went with it: his ineluctable voice, and his wit, which grew out of his melancholy, which is the wellspring for any satirist of the first order. I liked his writing because it was careful, by which I don’t mean it was polite, but well-ordered. It combined the best aspects of reporting—a gimlet eye and an open heart—with a philosophical point of view that skipped ahead of any claim of self-indulgence. I always wondered how he did it because that’s what writers always wonder: How did that writer do it? David was too modest an artist to talk about “process”; he lived by doing what he was meant to do: educate himself in public until illness and then death drew its curtain. 
 
 Photograph by Larry Busacca/Getty Images/Tribeca Film Festival. 

 David Rakoff, the popular writer and radio personality, died yesterday of cancer, age 47. He was a frequent contributor to the radio show This American Life, with which he had been involved since its inception, as well as an award-winning essayist. 
 
 Last year, he won the highly acclaimed Thurber Prize for American Humor for his final essay collection, "Half Empty." His first two books of essays, "Fraud" and "Don't Get Too Comfortable", won the Humor category of the Lambda Literary Awards celebrating excellence in LGBT literature. 
 
 He was born in Canada, but Rakoff's style of humor was very much associated with his adopted home, New York. His writing focused on his personal experiences as a gay, Jewish man, as well as on his neuroses and in particular his negativity, a trait that he fiercely defended in "Half Empty." 
 
 David Rakoff was friends with the writers Amy and David Sedaris. The latter described Rakoff's work as "truly witty, almost in a lost, old-fashioned way." 
 
 His three essay collections were published over 11 years, a relatively low level of output that the writer Edward Champion, who met Rakoff several times, put down to "the high neuroses David brought to the writing process." 
 
 He also acted in Off-Broadway plays and movies. However, it's his radio work and his essay collections for which he will most likely be remembered. 
 
 David Rakoff was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in 2010. He had already beaten cancer once, aged 22, when he had had a form of lymphatic cancer. While undergoing chemotherapy for the tumor, he went on The Daily Show, where he told Jon Stewart, "The will to keep on going is incredibly strong... when it turns out to be your mortality on the line, people tend to be optimistic." 
 
 Update: According to reports, This American Life is preparing a special program dedicated to Rakoff's work, to air next week. 
 
 Update 2: The National Post quotes Rakoff's long-time editor Bill Thomas in saying that Rakoff had submitted a finished novel, to be published in the fall. "The book is a novel, in verse, called 'Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die; Cherish, Perish.' I had my doubts about the project when he proposed it, but I was wrong. It is written with humor and sympathy and tenderness, and proves him to be the master of an altogether different art form." A story co-written by Rakoff, about a doctor who only writes in rhyme, was aired last week on This American Life. 
 
 See reactions on Twitter to David Rakoff's death: 
 
 RIP David Rakoff 

 David Rakoff, a prizewinning humorist whose mordant, neurotic essays examined everything from his surreal stint portraying Sigmund Freud in a Christmastime shop window display to his all-too-real battles with cancer, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 47. 
 
 His death was announced by his mother, Gina Shochat-Rakoff. Mr. Rakoff’s cancer had first appeared when he was 22 and recently reappeared as a tumor in his left shoulder. 
 
 The return of his cancer, and the possibility that his arm and shoulder would have to be amputated, were the subjects of the concluding essay in Mr. Rakoff’s most recent collection, “Half Empty” (2010), a darkly comic paean to negativity. 
 
 For his incisive wit and keen eye for the preposterous, Mr. Rakoff (pronounced RACK-off) was often likened to the essayist David Sedaris, a mentor and close friend. Like Mr. Sedaris, he was a frequent contributor to “This American Life,” broadcast on public radio. 
 
 Mr. Rakoff’s print essays appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Details, Salon, Slate and elsewhere. They formed the meat of his three published collections, which, besides “Half Empty,” include “Fraud” (2001), in which he chronicled, among other things, his brief appearance on a television soap opera (Mr. Rakoff was also an actor); and “Don’t Get Too Comfortable” (2005), which, as its jacket proclaims, skewers the American demographic beleaguered by “the never-ending quest for artisanal olive oil and other first world problems.” 
 
 A self-described gay Jewish Canadian transplant to New York City, Mr. Rakoff was a social anthropologist of postmodern life. His research often entailed firsthand field work, as when, in pursuit of conspicuous consumption, he became a passenger on one of the last flights of the Concorde. 
 
 He described the trip in his essay “As It Is in Heaven”: “At 42,000 feet and Mach 1.71 (1,110 m.p.h.), we are given some small canapés. Triple rounds of edible money: filet mignon topped with caviar, smoked salmon, foie gras and a gooseberry.” 
 
 (As a cultural counterweight, Mr. Rakoff next flew on Hooters Air, the short-lived airline operated by the Hooters restaurant chain and with a crew that included its pneumatic, scarcely clad hostesses, an experience recounted in the same essay.) 
 
 While some critics faulted Mr. Rakoff’s writing as overly aphoristic, many praised his singular style, which combined an amiable dyspepsia with an almost palpable undercurrent of melancholy. 
 
 In his essay “Christmas Freud,” Mr. Rakoff tells of volunteering to spend several weeks as Freud in a tableau vivant, part of the 1996 holiday window displays at Barneys New York, the luxury emporium. (He knew the store’s creative director.) 
 
 Gawked at by passers-by, the display included little more at first than Mr. Rakoff, a chair and an analyst’s couch. That, he soon determined, would not do. 
 
 “I’ve decided to start seeing patients,” he wrote. “I’m simply not man enough to sit exposed in a window doing nothing; it’s too humiliating and too boring.” Manhattan being Manhattan, they came in droves; many spoke to the good doctor about Christmastime anxiety. 
 
 One such “patient,” a writer for the British newspaper The Independent, described Mr. Rakoff’s analytical spiel as follows: 
 
 “ ‘Let’s look at the name. Father Christmas,’ ” he says, emphatically. “ ‘It’s obviously an Oedipal fantasy. Santa Claus is supposed to come down a chimney, a simulacrum for a vagina. Then he leaves presents, and children are always anxious about what kind. So it’s really all about parents engaged in sex, an act that necessarily excludes their kids.’ ” 
 
 David Benjamin Rakoff was born in Montreal on Nov. 27, 1964, and reared in Toronto. He earned a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies from Columbia in 1986 and afterward worked in Japan as a translator. 
 
 His stay in Japan was cut short by a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He moved back to Canada for more than a year of treatment and remained free of cancer for two decades. 
 
 Returning to New York, Mr. Rakoff worked as an editor and publicist for various publishers before gathering sufficient nerve to pursue writing in earnest. A letter he wrote to Mr. Sedaris in the early 1990s after hearing him on the radio, and Mr. Sedaris’s subsequent championing of Mr. Rakoff’s work, led to his own radio career, which in turn led to his books. 
 
 Mr. Rakoff acted in several stage plays by Mr. Sedaris and his sister Amy. He also wrote the screen adaptation for, and starred in, a 20-minute film, “The New Tenants” — a ghoulish comedy about the worst New York rental experience imaginable — which won the Academy Award for best live-action short film in 2009. 
 
 Besides his father, Vivian Rakoff, a psychiatrist, and his mother, a physician, Mr. Rakoff’s is survived by a brother, Simon, a well-known stand-up comic in Canada, and a sister, Ruth Rakoff, whose memoir, “When My World Was Very Small” (2010), recounts her own battle with cancer. 
 
 Mr. Rakoff received the Thurber Prize for American Humor for “Half Empty.” “Fraud” and “Don’t Get Too Comfortable” received Lambda Literary Awards, an annual honor for lesbian- and gay-themed books. 
 
 When Mr. Rakoff’s cancer returned and he risked amputation, he ruminated on life without his arm and shoulder. It was not so much the physical loss that worried him, he said, but something far larger. 
 
 “There are other extrafunctional and noncosmetic realities I have to consider,” Mr. Rakoff wrote in “Another Shoe,” his essay about the tumor. “How does someone without a left arm know he’s having a heart attack, for example?”
– David Rakoff, longtime contributor to This American Life, essayist adored for his cynical point of view, and beloved voice for the gay and Jewish communities, died of cancer yesterday at 47, reports the Huffington Post. Some tributes: Margalit Fox, New York Times: Rakoff was a "was a social anthropologist of postmodern life" who was often praised for his "singular style, which combined an amiable dyspepsia with an almost palpable undercurrent of melancholy." Linda Holmes, NPR: His voice was the "antithesis of the empty and unsatisfying fascination with some kind of centimeter-deep 'keeping it real.' That, it turns out, is not mushy, gushy, sunshine-y insistence that everything is great." Hilton Als, New Yorker: "David was too modest an artist to talk about 'process'; he lived by doing what he was meant to do: educate himself in public until illness and then death drew its curtain." Rakoff himself, writing about his illness for the New York Times: "Fantastic days are what you wish upon those who have so few sunrises left, those whose lungs are so lesion-spangled with new cancer that they should be embracing as much life as they can. Time’s a-wasting, go out and have yourself a fantastic day! Fantastic days are for goners."