I typically spend the first four or five months of a new year renting and watching Academy Award-nominated films. Maybe it’s where we live or maybe I’m just not quick enough on the draw, but I never manage to see many of them prior to the awards ceremony. This weekend I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the French memoir Le Scaphandre et le Papillon.

I pretty much decided that I needed to see this movie when Julian Schnabel beat out the Coen brothers, Ridley Scott and Tim Burton for the Best Director Golden Globe. When I started watching it, I thought first that it was really weird. But as the story unfolded and I realized what was going on, it started to seem pretty freaking amazing. Then it made my eyes hurt and I had to go take out my contacts.

Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor of Elle magazine who suffered a massive stroke at the age of 43. He was left paralyzed and unable to talk, a condition known as “locked-in syndrome” because the patient is aware and awake but completely unable to communicate. He is basically “locked” inside his body.

Bauby’s speech therapist created a form of communication for him where she would repeatedly recite the letters of the alphabet in order of their frequency of use. Bauby would blink his left eye (the only muscle he could control in his entire body) when she got to the letter he wanted. This way, they slowly and painfully spelled out words.

With the help of a very patient transcriber, Bauby wrote his book using this one-letter-at-a-time technique. One letter at a time, people. One letter at a time. An entire book one letter at a time. Which is to say that there is pretty much nothing that can’t be done if you break it down to one letter at a time.