FACING DEATH HE LEARNED TO LIVE

AT 38, WRITER JONATHAN GLUCK WAS DIAGNOSED WITH INCURABLE BLOOD CANCER AND TOLD HE COULD DIE IN 18 MONTHS. IN A NEW MEMOIR GLUCK SAYS HE WAS SAVED BY SCIENCE-AND FOUND RARE GIFTS IN AN UNEXPECTED FUTURE: 'I AM A MEDICAL MIRACLE'

- By EILEEN FINAN

In April, when Jonathan Gluck turned 60, friends urged him to mark the milestone with a blowout event. After all, “noonewas sure I’d reach 60,” he says. But the writer and former managing editor of Vogue magazine wasn’t interested: “I was like, ‘I don’t want to tempt the Fates.’”

After being diagnosed with incurable blood cancer at the age of 38, Gluck knows he’s already outlived his predicted expiry date by 20 years. But the truth is, he did want to celebrate in his own, quiet way. So he, his wife, Didi, and their 17-year-old son flew from their New York City home to Ohio to visit their daughter at college—and they had a birthday dinner in the school cafeteria. On the menu: a “throwback to the ’70s” salad bar and chocolate chip pretzel cookies. “I couldn’t have been happier,” he says. “It was about being together, the four of us.”

Finding joy in the day-to-day has been one of the “strange gifts” of Gluck’s life with cancer. “It comes naturally,” says the writer, whose new memoir An Exercise in Uncertainty: A Memoir of Illness and Hope chronicles howhe learned to accept living with an incurable disease and examines the remarkable developments in cancer treatment that have kept him alive. “When you receive a serious diagnosis, youre forced to think about death a lot more than most people, which is awful in alot of ways,” he says. “But there’s a sense of urgency to everything for me that I think is useful to any- one. It inspired me to make the most of my time.”

In 2003 Gluck was a rising star in the New York publishing world, and he felt like he had it all. He’d just been hired as deputy editor of