David Rakoff’s third book of essays, “Half Empty,” came out in the fall of 2010, nine months after he learned that the pain he’d been experiencing in his left arm and shoulder was the result of a malignant sarcoma. David was an extraordinary essayist — the book won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and, like his two previous collections, was a best seller — so it came as some surprise when he called his editor at Doubleday to say that he wanted his next book to be a novel written in rhyme.

“I will admit I paused for a very long time,” Bill Thomas, the editor, said recently. “A novel in verse. But David was extremely passionate about the project. He’d been ruminating on it for a decade. This was late 2010, and of course he was quite sick at this point; he’d been battling cancer for some time. But with a writer of David’s caliber, who I personally loved and admired very much, I just said, ‘O.K., we’ll figure out a way to publish it.’ ”

For the next year and a half, David wrote, between surgeries and chemotherapy regimens and in the face of the growing awareness that his cancer, as he put it, “would not be denied.” The process of writing had always been an exercise in anguish management for him (he once said in an interview that writing was like having his teeth pulled out — through his penis), but to me and other friends, this book seemed different. He discussed the fate of his characters, he read passages to visitors from his bed, he sent e-mails saying he was feeling good because the writing had gone well that day.