This is more than embellishment. Dessaix’s writing is always an expression of determined individuality: a declaration of self-fashioning. In his autobiographical writing, such as A Mother’s Disgrace (1994), Dessaix has explored how the knowledge that he was adopted (combined with a quiet only childhood on Sydney’s lower north shore) made him especially attuned to creating an identity through language and reading: for a child given an entirely new name and family, self is a matter of self-conscious process, and Dessaix has crafted a rare life around cultural connection. He was a popular arts radio broadcaster from 1985 to 1995, before switching to writing, with the same light touch. Part of this lightness is an absolute refusal of cant, and part of this, in turn, is a scrupulous – though playful – accounting of his uncommon and, in his own words, ‘dilettantish’ tastes (a doctoral thesis on Turgenev, for starters). There is a Scheherezade-like quality, too, perhaps, to this prose, refusing heaviness with crisp brightness. Dessaix has been living with an HIV diagnosis since 1994.

Though I can admire his skill, I admit I have never really connected with Dessaix’s writing – that is, until I began What Days Are For, and finally started to appreciate his humour. That I should do so here is ironic, since the author spends most of his memoir hovering close to death.

On a Sunday night in July 2011, Dessaix, then sixty-seven, was walking along Sydney’s Oxford Street, after a rehearsal of his play A Mad Affair, when he suddenly found himself lying crumpled on the pavement. He had suffered a heart attack. Rescued by a young man wearing a FUCK YOU T-shirt, and again by his hotel’s night porter, who called an ambulance, Dessaix was lucky to make it to hospital. He tells us briskly that he ‘gave up the ghost’ twice en route. Even at St Vincent’s it was touch and go, as a medication almost made him bleed to death. For two weeks Dessaix drowned in vivid dreams, moving in and out of his own thoughts, and this is a day-by-day account. But Dessaix uses his dissociated state to spin the book out into something much more: a meditation on life, love, infatuation; travel, religion, and friendship.

Robert Dessaix

Though never dwelling on medical details, Dessaix doesn’t stint on indignity, presenting himself as a comic figure, flapping encannulated arms, gurgling beneath his oxygen mask, and given to blurting inner thoughts out loud – though still able to retrieve from his memory the Russian for I have soiled myself for his nurse, who takes it in her phlegmatic Russian stride. Friends, old and new, appear to sit with him, and Dessaix uses their confused presence as a foil for a series of meditations, offered to us lucidly on the page, though emerging to the friends’ ears as garbled snatches. Dessaix is clearly loved by many: how awful it would be, he finds himself thinking, to have gotten to this point and have no friends. By far the most important presence is his long-term partner, writer Peter Timms, who was on a rough boat crossing back to their Tasmanian home when Dessaix was first struck down and overcame his fear of planes to get to his bedside. The book is also, in its unsentimental way, a celebration of ‘the voice I’ve heard every day for half of my life’.

Dessaix realises, as he lies looking out his western window, that he has lived a huge amount of his life in the blocks below (including meeting Timms via an advertisement in the gay press); and the book is a clear-eyed taking of account. Dessaix ponders India as the place where he most ‘likes himself’; though rejecting ‘mushy invocations’ to any deity, he likes its robust collisions of faith – a far cry from the long, lonely summers of a north shore childhood, vividly evoked, which confused Christianity with niceness. (‘Was Jesus nice? Not really, when you read between the lines, not in a Lane Cove sense.’) He discourses on infatuation: the way it is enabled by longer-term relationships, its tendency to strike in foyers, and what may have occurred between Turgenev and the young actress Marya Gavrilovna Savina, with whom he was smitten, during their single hour alone together in a railway carriage (the subject of Dessaix’s play). Desire, and its falling away, is a constant question. Donald Richie, great Japan diarist and extoller of exile’s freedoms, is a presence; so, too, are Enid Blyton, Jane Austen, Somerset Maugham, and Gogol.

And there is hospital life itself, keenly observed. As he improves, Dessaix is moved into a shared room with talkback-addicted Ziggy and Stan, who accidentally shot off his own leg while duck hunting. Stan mutters ‘fucking refugees’ at the television, and Dessaix hears himself yelling, ‘You’re morons … brain-dead lumps of stinking … scum!’ (Can you have ‘lumps’ of scum, he wonders?). Coming to himself, Dessaix apologises profusely, and the men – chasteningly forgiving – carry on as though nothing has happened: ‘End of story, mate,’ Stan says, ‘end of story.’ As self-characterisation this is terrific, and very funny. Throughout the book, Dessaix shows us how much an independent life of the mind means to him, while making space in its pages for the less elevated matter of life—including the joy he takes in cups of hospital tea. This is a welcome counterweight to a less likeable aspect of Dessaix’s oeuvre: his tendency to dismiss the modern (in this instance, hook-up apps and unleashed self-expression).

But the jewel of this book is the section in which Dessaix comes across Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Days’, from which his book takes its title. ‘Where can we live but days?’ the poet asks, and, in doing so, Dessaix writes, ‘gives me heart’. Questioning the ‘meaning of life’ strikes him as fatuous, but Larkin’s honesty is bracing: how do we make sense of our days if we can live nowhere else? Dessaix comes to the conclusion that while he has ‘squandered decades’, it is the ‘layered’ days that have been his best – when he has read, shopped, written, walked the dog, while beneath he has glimpsed ‘cluster after meshing cluster of experience’. This, ultimately, is the point of Dessaix’s enjoyable and poignant book: its light layerings enfold this gem of an idea, but also imitate it, as they float across the meshing clusters of a life.