“In my amputee support group, I usually keep my mouth shut,” says Nick DiMartino. That’s not standard behavior for the garrulous 75-year-old, a sunny conversationalist with a genuine curiosity about people. But upbeat dialogue isn’t always helpful in a support-group setting.
“Other people talk about prosthetics that don’t fit and phantom pain that makes their lives miserable,” DiMartino explains. “Some of them ask me, ‘How can you be so happy?’ And all I can say is that I’m one of the lucky ones. I lost a leg, but I gained so much more.”
In addition to meeting the love of his life, DiMartino—a retired bookseller and the author of three dozen novels and plays—acquired an improbable appreciation for an underrated 19th-century author. “Do you know why Nick always seems so cheerful?” somebody laughed once during a support group meeting. “It’s called ‘Jules Verne Therapy.’”
“It was true,” DiMartino later recalled. “I was healing myself with Jules Verne. Not what I expected to do with my retirement.”
After losing his right leg in 2021 to complications from a blood clot, DiMartino spent many months leafing through all 66 of Verne’s novels and story collections. He wrote a summary of each book and started weaving those reflections together with essays about his adaptation to limb loss. The resulting corpus, published last year as An Amputee’s Guide to Jules Verne (BearManor Media), fuses Verne’s enthusiasm for exotic landscapes with DiMartino’s explorations in the terra incognito of disability.
“For someone like me, a one-legged reader in a wheelchair, an old man alone most of the day…Verne’s constant mobility, his cavalier adventuring all over the planet, and the delightful characters he forms lasting friendships with, are the opposite of my life,” DiMartino writes in one essay. “They’re the part of life I’m not experiencing. They restore my perspective. They complete and satisfy the missing parts of me.”
Though Americans tend to dismiss Verne as a spinner of schoolboy yarns, he has long been considered a major cultural figure in his native France and elsewhere in Europe. Writing in the late 19th century, when print was the only mass medium, he introduced readers to remote corners of the world via intimate portraits of far-flung people and places. Literary masters such as Roland Barthes, Jean Cocteau, and Jean-Paul Sartre cited Verne as a key influence.
We spoke with DiMartino last month to learn how “Jules Verne Therapy” helped him adapt to limb loss—and how limb loss helped him exit an unhealthy relationship, enter a much healthier one, deepen his bonds with his family, and discover happiness he never expected to find so late in life. You can buy a copy of An Amputee’s Guide to Jules Verne from BearManor Media (bearmanormedia.com) or indiebound.org. This conversation is edited for length and clarity.
Let’s rewind to 2021, before you had your amputation. You were newly retired but still very active at age 71. What did you think the next five years of your life were going to look like?
Wow. Talk about an erased moment. That’s a really good question. I think my plan was just to continue writing books. Writing and reading have always been the two mainstays of my life.
Was there a specific writing project on your agenda, or were you fishing around for the next idea?
I was working on something I’ve been working on for most of my life, an eight-volume fantasy epic called The Devil in Love. It was my attempt to create a kind of mythological backstory for gay people. It seemed utterly necessary at the time I started it; it was funny and full of great moments. But with young people now being much more fluid than we were in my youth, it didn’t seem relevant anymore.
I can remember when gay people lived in fear. My family always said I was closed and unavailable, but that’s because I was hiding my life from them—and I adore my family. I wanted to overcome that fear, and I was determined to transform it into something joyous and full of life. I thought this epic would be my major life achievement.
So how did limb loss bring you to Jules Verne?
Almost every Jules Verne title is about travel, and that was part of the hook for me in my wheelchair, with my limited mobility. He traveled everywhere. He had his own boat, and he could go anywhere he wanted. And his characters can go wherever their imaginations lead them. If they’re given a plot of land in the Yukon, they can go up there and mine for gold. They can do anything their imagination suggests to them. I can write about those things, but I can’t do them. His novels opened the world for me.
Were there other aspects of Verne’s storytelling that made him especially attractive for someone adapting to limb loss?
He genuinely likes people. I can tell when an author is looking down on the human race, and Verne is respectful of human beings. When he writes about people who go around doing the hard things that need to be done in the world, they don’t use force. It’s almost always a conflict of minds, and I love that.
He included people of many different nationalities in his books, almost always with great respect for their customs and traditions. He was ahead of his time in that way. He has his villains, and often his villains are masterminds who are just too intelligent. His heroes are almost always people who act on ideas. There are very few shootouts in Verne. In fact, when there is shooting, it’s usually done by women who have to shoot a polar bear in the head or whatever to show they’re as brave as men. He has some extremely brave women—again, ahead of his time.
At what point did you pivot from “I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying these books” to “I’m going to read all of Verne’s books and write about them from an amputee angle”?
I’m trying to remember what in the world gave me the impulse to try to read them all. Part of it was the realization that, due to poor translations, the United States is the only country in the world that thinks of Jules Verne as a children’s author. The language was dumbed down and simplified for teenage boys, in the hope that they would sit still for a while and get absorbed in these thrilling adventures. American publishers turned Verne’s original prose into easier vocabulary. The books are now being retranslated into English in more faithful renditions.
At some point, I started looking for a book that encapsulated all of Verne’s novels. After working 50 years in a bookstore, my first resource is always a book. I don’t go online first. And I couldn’t find any book like that. It didn’t exist.
So you had to write it yourself. Does your experience of disability over the last five years deepen your appreciation of the stories he’s telling?
One of the things that took getting used to as an amputee was needing other people. I was always an independent person. I ran for 20 years, I walked to work every day for 50 years. After I lost my limb, my family stepped up to the plate in ways that I’ll choke up if I try to talk about it. It has brought me closer to my family than I’ve ever been in my life. My brother owns a fiveplex, and the ground-floor unit was open. He told me, “Move in. It’s yours.” I keep coming back to the word lucky. I’ve tried to live a good life, but a lot of it is luck. And luck has played a role for me.
What role does your support group play in your life? It sounds as if you don’t necessarily need a lot of peer support.
The people there have helped me in ways that I didn’t expect. At first, I had struggled to get through my PT and to wear my prosthetic for hours each day. In my little apartment, where I spend all day reading and writing, the prosthetic brought nothing into my life anyway. Someone in my support group finally said, “Nick, find your own path. All of us have a different path.” It was like a light going on. I kept thinking there were definite rules for behavior. My support group taught me the word hacks, the idea that everybody does things in different ways. You adapt to your surroundings and make them work for you. I put the prosthetic away and stopped worrying about it.
The support group opened such a different way of thinking for me that I feel I owe it to new people to keep showing up and being available. Because there might be something I can say to someone that will help them on their path.
You could introduce them to Jules Verne Therapy.
Well, Jules Verne does not appeal to everyone.
You shared with me that about 15 years before losing your leg, you had another life-altering health challenge—becoming HIV-positive. Do you think going through that experience helped you adapt to limb loss?
I would not be surprised if that were the case. I met my ex-partner Dave at an HIV support group, and I thought Dave was going to be the love of my life. He could tell such thrilling stories about his criminal and heroin past. But when it stopped being his past and returned to the present, he became a very scary partner. Everybody has a good side, and he did too. But near the end, he became terrible. I was really living in fear.
It’s still amazing to me that Dave left me with Lawrence, who is a genuine lover and caregiver. It would not have happened if I had both legs. It was because I was disabled that Dave introduced me to Lawrence, and then Lawrence stepped in to take Dave’s place. I never expected to have this kind of relationship. I had failed twice in my life, in two long-term relationships that were both one-sided. So finding true love for the first time at age 75—it just amazes me. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t needed someone. I was utterly lucky, in the right place at the right time. Life has treated me kindly in ways that were unexpected.
This almost seems like something Jules Verne might write about—the best parts of human nature overcoming the perils of a difficult challenge.
It’s something I ponder, how out of something that seemed catastrophic, something beautiful came. It’s choking me up, because it’s true. That has happened enough in my life that it seems like a pattern.
Before we run out of time, I want to make sure I ask about your next project, An Amputee’s Guide to Oz. What brought you from Jules Verne to L. Frank Baum?
I’m a storyteller at heart, and I wanted to tell an Oz story. So, after reading all 14 of Baum’s Oz books and all 19 by his successor, Ruth Plumly Thompson, I decided to write my own. I’ve written it all the way through nine times now. There are all these rules in Oz, and I broke one rule after another; my publisher would correct me, and I would turn in another draft. The ninth one made it through without any correction. Now it’s in the process of being illustrated.
OK, so the next book is not a collection of personal essays combined with chapters about the Oz novels? This is an original novel that takes place in the Oz universe?
I won’t pretend I didn’t write analyses of all the Oz books, because I did. If someone wants to publish An Amputee’s Guide to Oz, the chapters are already written. But what I really wanted to do was tell a good story. There are lots of unofficial Oz spinoffs out there. Other people have done it. I thought I could do it better. So we’ll see how that worked. We’ll see if the book is as full of life as I hope it is.
