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PLEASE REMEMBER ME: A Young Woman's Story of Her Friendship with an Unforgettable Fifteen-Year-Old Boy by Mari Brady

PLEASE REMEMBER ME: A Young Woman's Story of Her Friendship with an Unforgettable Fifteen-Year-Old Boy

By

Pub Date: Sept. 16th, 1977
Publisher: Doubleday

When you're young and looking for your first job you can't help but wonder where you're meant to go and what you're meant to do,"" begins this brief reminiscence. At 22, Mari Brady joined the staff of New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center as a recreation aide. There she met Graham Banks, a spunky, fifteen-year-old patient who would rouse the floor for Bingo, detour Mari's nosy supervisor, or play Robin Hood with another patient's perfume prize. The staff admired him enormously--young readers will too--for throughout his strained last year, when he endured surgery and chemotherapy, he managed to keep his sense of humor and, quietly, search for some significance to his life besides. Although once in a while the language dips into the bleeping Calliveri idiom, this is no Love Story--Mari was friend and confidante only, and Graham's resilience is honestly encountered. At the end, all tubes and plasma, he reaches out to a wayward cousin: ""I want my life to have had some meaning--maybe just to touch someone."" A slip of a story--no longer than a Sunday magazine article really--but the interplay is warmly represented.