A tough, uplifting account of a spouse’s terminal illness—and helpful advice for survivors.
In this debut memoir, a woman reflects on the life lessons she learned from caring for her mortally ill husband.
Welser relates how she was in her mid-30s, climbing the corporate ladder to greater and greater success, when her life took an unexpected turn. After experiencing a flurry of health issues, her husband, Ray, developed glioblastoma multiforme grade IV, a type of brain cancer so serious that the National Institutes of Health nicknamed it “The Terminator.” Ray lived less than a year after his diagnosis, and suddenly the author found herself a widow. In these pages, she recounts the story of Ray’s illness, told in part through excerpts from the journal she kept throughout the ordeal. “I need a scorecard to keep track,” goes one such entry, “but yesterday, we met with the medical oncologist and the radiation oncologist” is set for today. She fills these sections of her memoir with both the details of her husband’s medical condition and her own striking memories of the experience. “Life support machines make sounds that embed themselves in your brain,” she writes. “They haunt you long after you hear them.” She takes readers through every step of Ray’s decline, including how his cancer affected him mentally, and it’s all written with a direct immediacy. Eventually, the story moves to a hospice and then a funeral home, after which Welser turned her attention to how to live in a world suddenly very changed: “Positive thinking and affirmations help the brain reset itself.” In the final section of her book, she advocates the kind of “emotional agility” that helped her survive.
Readers who have been through personal or medical trials like the author’s will appreciate this upbeat approach as well as Welser’s useful advice for surviving the journey (such as having a “go-to” bag that includes Band-Aids, antibacterial spray, and extra pens). This combination of dogged optimism and practical counsel animates the whole volume, adding it to the subgenre of books by authors who have coped with terminal illness. Readers get the doctor visits, the daily struggles, the momentary flutterings of hope, and the sad resignation that accompany the end of a loved one’s life. This is very effectively done, and Welser transitions her recollections smoothly to the memoir’s final section, which concentrates more on the life lessons she drew from her horrible experience of suddenly finding herself living in a world without the husband with whom she’d planned on spending her entire life. Her guidance in this strand of her story is uniformly quiet and encouraging: “Take a deep breath. A loved one being diagnosed with an illness like this one forces us to face our own mortality.” One strategy that the author stresses involves a “bucket list”—the common self-help idea of creating an inventory of things you want to do before you die in order to feel that you’ve lived life to the fullest. Her own list includes such items as “feed a koala” and “participate in a flash mob.” Welser’s invitation for readers to both compile their own lists and put them into practice will fill fellow travelers with much needed hope in their worst hours.
A tough, uplifting account of a spouse’s terminal illness—and helpful advice for survivors.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8885040761
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.
A writer’s journey to find himself.
In January 2015, French novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and memoirist Carrère began a 10-day meditation retreat in the Morvan forest of central France. For 10 hours per day, he practiced Vipassana, “the commando training of meditation,” hoping for both self-awareness and material for a book. “I’m under cover,” he confesses, planning to rely on memory rather than break the center’s rule forbidding note taking. Long a practitioner of tai chi, the author saw yoga, too, as a means of “curtailing your ego, your greed, your thirst for competition and conquest, about educating your conscience to allow it unfiltered access to reality, to things as they are.” Harsh reality, however, ended his stay after four days: A friend had been killed in a brutal attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and he was asked to speak at his funeral. Carrère’s vivid memoir, translated by Lambert—and, Carrère admits, partly fictionalized—covers four tumultuous years, weaving “seemingly disparate” experiences into an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma. Besides reflecting on yoga, he reveals the recurring depression and “erratic, disconnected, unrelenting” thoughts that led to an unexpected diagnosis; his four-month hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, during which he received electroshock therapy; his motivation for, and process of, writing; a stay on the Greek island of Leros, where he taught writing to teenage refugees, whose fraught journeys and quiet dreams he portrays with warmth and compassion; his recollection of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, which he wrote about in Lives Other Than My Own; an intense love affair; and, at last, a revival of happiness. Carrère had planned to call his yoga book Exhaling, which could serve for this memoir as well: There is a sense of relief and release in his effort to make sense of his evolving self.
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60494-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
A cheeky, gossipy dual biography.
A study of two writers uncomfortably entwined.
After Eve Babitz (1943-2021) died, her biographer Anolik came upon a letter from Babitz to Joan Didion (1934-2021) that startled her. Filled with “rage, despair, impatience, contempt,” it read like a “lovers’ quarrel.” “Eve was talking to Joan the way you talk to someone who’s burrowed deep under your skin, whose skin you’re trying to burrow deep under.” That surprise discovery suggested a “complicated alliance” between the two. In sometimes breathless prose, with sly asides to the “Reader,” Anolik draws on more than 100 interviews with Babitz and many other sources to follow both women’s lives, tumultuous loves, and aspirations before and after they met in Los Angeles in 1967, sometimes straining to prove their significance to one another. “Joan and Eve weren’t each other’s opposite selves so much as each other’s shadow selves,” she asserts. “Eve was what Joan both feared becoming and longed to become: an inspired amateur.” At the same time, “Joan was what Eve feared becoming and desired to become: a fierce professional.” Didion had just won acclaim for Slouching Towards Bethlehem when Babitz, newly arrived from New York, began socializing with her and her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The reticent Didion and the sensual, energetic Babitz could not have been more different, and Anolik clearly prefers Babitz. “I’m crazy for Eve,” she admits, “love her with a fan’s unreasoning abandon. Besides, Joan is somebody I naturally root against: I respect her work rather than like it; find her persona—part princess, part wet blanket—tough going.” Their relationship—hardly a friendship—fell apart in 1974 when Didion and Dunne were assigned to edit Babitz’s autobiographical novel, Eve’s Hollywood. Babitz, resentful of Didion’s attitude and intrusion, “fired” her, pursuing her writing career on her own. Didion soared to literary fame; not, alas, Babitz.
A cheeky, gossipy dual biography.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781668065488
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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