LOSING LINDA MAE

A CANCER CAREGIVING MEMOIR

by Logan Lee Lamson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 5, 2025

In this debut memoir, nonprofit executive Lamson reflects on caring for his mother during her final year after a terminal cancer diagnosis.

The book opens with an account of a family dinner at a local restaurant in Wichita, Kansas, in July 2015. The group knows their waitress by name and balances idle chitchat with playful banter between the siblings, whose rivalries and inside jokes have followed them into adulthood. As they take a family picture, Lamson reflects on the juxtaposition of the smiling group with their current nightmare. His mother, Linda Mae, had been diagnosed months prior with brain cancer. By the time of the events of this opening chapter, she’d already lost most of her hair from chemotherapy treatment, had ports implanted into her chest and skull, and had been hospitalized for weeks due to medical complications that included shingles and neuropathy. This tension sets the stage for a poignant memoir in which the author honors his mother’s legacy while describing his own various stages of grief and loss. Although the book is more than 600 pages long, its detailed, intimate narrative spans less than a year; the author lost his mother in January 2016. The chapters survey the daily conversations, medical treatments, and rapidly declining health of Linda Mae’s last days. The book has poignant moments of humor along the way, such as the family’s sarcastic response to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Lamson’s playful mocking of a Green Bay Packers hat that his aunt was knitting. (“Mom discreetly [flipped] me the bird” in response, he adds.) Other moments center on Lamson’s responses to his mother’s imminent death, including his anger at God during a Christmas service at the family’s Lutheran church: “I cannot hear any more praise for someone who has profoundly neglected my mom,” he reflects on a concluding prayer of thanksgiving.

The volume, described as a “creative nonfiction memoir,” is stylized as a journal with daily entries. Lamson wrote this first-person account after his mother’s passing, and his own subsequent diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, whose treatments mirrored his mother’s, in 2020. It reads like a novel, complete with detailed scene-setting, re-created dialogue, and the author’s own internal monologue. This approach complements the work’s deeply personal story, allowing readers into the most intimate of family spaces, conversations, and thoughts. Readers will find themselves cheering alongside the family at a pizza party celebrating a successful craniotomy that was “too miraculous to fit within the narrative of Mom’s cancer journey,” only to find their hopes crushed by a later conversation with a hospice representative, who gave the family directions on how to set up their mother’s bedroom for her final days. The book concludes with Linda Mae’s cremation, commemorating her life while recognizing the void that her demise had left behind. At the same time, Lamson doesn’t shy away from covering difficult topics, such as how his mother’s cancer diagnosis and treatments changed her personality and made her a “very different [person] from the one who raised me.”

A powerful, well-crafted memoir of a cancer caregiver and devoted son.

Pub Date: July 5, 2025

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2026

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR