UNTIL THE WHEELS FALL OFF

Stephens recounts his college years and his wife’s harrowing experience with endometriosis in his memoir.

Moving beyond grief and starting over is a daunting task, and this memoir documents that struggle in striking and moving detail. As a kid in the Bronx, Stephens was brought up in a family of 11 kids. After his dad was injured, his legal settlement allowed the family to move to a middle-class suburb in New Jersey. There, the author became a high school athlete and ended up at Winston-Salem State University, a historically Black school. In this unfamiliar but inspiring environment, he met others with similar ambitions, some of whom became luminaries. Back in New York, Stephens dealt with drama in his large family and married Maleka, who would be his wife for 29 years. An accountant in Manhattan, Maleka shared a sense of humor with the author. Unfortunately, she suffered from endometriosis, a condition in which tissue like that in the uterus grows outside of the uterus. The debilitating condition required many procedures, hospital stays, and hard decisions, all of which Maleka handled with her matter-of-fact personality. Stephens ended up with a lot on his own plate: starting a consultancy, taking care of elderly relatives, and navigating his wife’s chronic illness. (“The fear I had always imagined simply wasn’t there. My deep love for her made fear irrelevant.”) Stephens clearly outlines the path he took to achieve success while still having to confront family problems. The stories in his memoir are compelling; most are understandably dedicated to Maleka’s health struggles, which could be a book unto itself. There are some problems in the writing, such as the author referring to his brothers and sisters as unnamed siblings and offering scant descriptions of his job. Still, while this is a memoir about life with a sick partner, it should resonate even with those who aren’t in similar circumstances.

A chronicle of overcoming challenges and moving on, rendered in unsparing and moving prose.