Based on the life and autobiographical writings of Mark O’Brien, a California journalist and poet who sought the full range of human experience despite being mostly confined to an iron lung, The Sessions tells its remarkable story with humor, frankness, little fanfare and no sanctimony.
Born in 1950, O’Brien was paralyzed by polio at age six and thereafter unable to breathe on his own. However, at times in his life he was strong enough to survive for several hours at a time outside the iron lung by means of a portable respirator. With the aid of this device, he enrolled at age 28 at UC Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s in journalism, traveling around campus on an electric gurney that he controlled with a stick held in his mouth.
He began contributing articles on his quest for independent living as a disabled person to periodicals, and writing poetry. (Before his death in 1999 he participated in a documentary, Breathing Lessons, by Jessica Yu, that won the Oscar for Documentary Short Subject in 1996.)
