I saw this film in Singapore last week, but just before I entered the cinema, I went to buy Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir, 'Le Scaphandre et le Papillon' that this film was based on. The book is thin, so it could actually be finished in one sitting (I read sporadically, so it took me two days)
The book was written after Bauby, a former 'Elle' magazine editor, suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed from head to toe, save for his left eye, and he wrote the book by communicating with the blinking of his eye. An amanuensis repeatedly recited a frequency-ordered alphabet (E, L, A, O, I, N, S, D ...), until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. He died in 1997 just a few days after the book was published.
