Once, he wrote that his wife Chaz was bugging him to start writing a memoir. There were bits about his status as the only film critic who liked the new Indiana Jones film, his distaste for 3D, and so on, but every now and again there’d be an essay about science fiction or his childhood obsession with the news, something about his life, and it became very clear that Roger Ebert’s Journal wasn’t going to be a typical blog for very long. At first, the blog was mostly a supplement to his reviews.

There’s very little about Roger Ebert that isn’t already public record. As an extension of the speaking voice he lost through several surgeries related to thyroid cancer, he launched Roger Ebert’s Journal in 2008 and began blogging regularly in addition to his duties as the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times.

But to what, I wondered, pulling myself through Steve James’ documentary. He’s been part of my life as a filmgoer and as a writer for as long as I’ve seriously been either of those things, and yet Life Itself loomed ominously, its mere existence a threat. He’d been writing about film for the whole duration of my life, was a fixture on T.V. In this documentary, Time Magazine‘s Richard Corliss says that Roger Ebert had been writing about film for half of its existence. I’ve seen movies in the same theater as Ebert, eaten a meal in the same room as him, too. I know that cover intimately: The red velvet of the movie theater seats, his black silhouette before an endless screen that could not exist in any reality but one liberally embellished by the mind.

A paperback copy of Roger Ebert’s memoir is there on my coffee table, between my chair and the screen I watch movies on. I’ve been avoiding Life Itself for a long time, as a book and as a film.

Life itself 2014