A Romp through the Fauci Diaries: Fame Turns to Shame
Then you have this strange and persistent obsession of Fauci of maintaining social position with daily infusions of assurance that he is great, loved, admired, admitted to all the right parties, attended all the best events, with a contacts list that included the world’s rich, famous, and powerful. This is all he had to assure himself of his grand life.
Even in the end, he does not seem to realize the role he played in upending the very system to which he so desperately wanted to belong.
Yes, nearly every page makes us angry but finishing it leaves us with something we had not expected; something like the sadness we feel in a Gothic novel when a promising life takes a terrible turn toward perdition and somehow cannot find the escape from that path.
This is the autobiography of Mr. Hyde, who in the fictional version surely knows he is bad. In this version, Mr. Hyde believes he is Dr. Jekyll.
The Picture of Dorian Gray also comes to mind. Fauci guarded his reputation as a scientist just as Dorian guarded his seeming youth. To do so required a costly exchange, the praise of the multitudes but escalating corruption. In both stories, the status of the soul (represented by the painting for Dorian) belies appearances.
Nowhere could he have anticipated during the writing of the book that six years after his apotheosis he would be trapped in a chair in a Senate chamber, ashen and defeated, surrounded by silent lawyers, his accusers on all sides, pleading the 5th Amendment 111 times.
The wings completely melted. De profundis clamavi.
