Living With A Secret: Chronicle Reviewer James Cole’s ‘Not A Whole Boy’

After author James Cole of Orleans was hit by a car while riding his bicycle in Southern California in 1994, a nurse bent over him as he lay in the street and asked him, “Is there anything about your medical history I should know?”

Cole wanted to laugh. “How many hours do you have?” was Cole’s response. He was then 28.

Cole tells this anecdote in his new memoir “Not a Whole Boy: A Medical Memoir” (The Stephen John Press, 2024).

Here’s why Cole wanted to laugh: He was born with a condition called cloacal exstrophy (CE). This means that his bladder was “inside out and exposed outside the abdomen.” His intestines and genitals were malformed. While today treatment for these babies has been standardized, few babies with CE survived in 1966 — in fact, none had survived prior to 1960. In case he died, Cole was baptized the day after he was born.

But Cole had a strong will to live. He survived in part thanks to multiple corrective surgeries as an infant, child and teen. He thrived in part thanks to the care of his loving family. Today he is a scriptwriter, movie reviewer, memoirist and pen-and-ink artist.

“I wanted to write about exstrophy because it’s the hidden birth defect. It’s hidden under clothes,” Cole said during a telephone interview last week.

Cole, 58, dedicates the memoir to his late mother, Nancy, an impressionist painter well known for her paintings of children and landscapes. Nancy kept notes on Cole’s early years in a baby book that ran right through high school. The family also took thousands of photographs.

Readers of “Not a Whole Boy” call Nancy “a force of nature,” Cole says. In fact, both Nancy, who died in 2016, and Bob, Cole’s father, who worked for CBS in Manhattan, were highly supportive of Cole.

Shortly after Cole’s birth in the hospital of his hometown of Greenwich, Conn., he was transferred to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital to be treated by pediatric specialists. He spent the bulk of the next eight months in the hospital.

It is impossible, in reading this “medical memoir,” not to admire Cole’s grit and the grit of his family. The Coles were told their baby wouldn’t live, and then they were told he wouldn’t walk.

“Each time I thumbed a nose at them,” Cole says, referring to the pessimistic doctors.

Cole was the third of his parents’ three children. Outside of the unique challenges caused by Cole’s ongoing medical condition, life moved on as he advanced through the local public schools.

Pool parties with friends caused extra difficulties because Cole was unable to remove his shirt the way the other boys did due to the bags he wore under his clothing to collect waste. At a pool party when he was about 11, “I envied not just the boys’ appearance, but their innocence. I so wanted to be like them; any one of them.” Early on, he developed “a lifelong process of covering up.” He had an ever-present fear that classmates and friends would discover his body differed from theirs.

“I wanted to tell my story because I lived in secrecy,” he says. “I did not share my secret until high school.”

His parents split up when he was 10, and his father moved out. Another big change came when Cole was in the tenth grade and he told his mother that he wanted the two of them to move. He hated Greenwich High, which had a graduating class of 720.

“I was lost,” he recalls. “I didn’t have a clique of kids.” Speaking with his mother, he “came up with the memory that we had summered for a week in Harding’s Beach Hills with friends.” In August 1983 the pair drove to Chatham and looked at houses. They bought the fourth house they toured, an antique Cape. Cole entered Chatham High School that January, halfway through his junior year.

“I was deliriously happy,” he says. There were 52 students in his class, and he made many friends. He graduated from Chatham High in 1985 and went on to UMass Amherst where he earned a degree in film/communications.

Following college, he lived in Burbank for 22 years working at Walt Disney Imagineering and writing scripts at night. When he was in the eighth grade Cole had developed an interest in filmmaking as “a refuge from the misery of school life.” Films would eventually become a passion. His script “Hot Shots,” based on his hospital experiences when he was 12, was filmed in 2002 in Camarillo, Calif. and released as “The Night Before.” The 19-minute award-winning film is now available for viewing on YouTube.

Between 1989 and 1991 Cole reviewed movies for The Cape Cod Chronicle. When he returned to Cape Cod from California the Orpheum was about to open in 2013 and he resumed his movie reviewing career.

“Not a Whole Boy” ends when Cole was just 17— he is contemplating writing a sequel. “I’ve had a very adventurous life,” he says. And the message of this memoir? “That life is about perseverance.”

“Not a Whole Boy” is available through Amazon.com.