An uplifting, life-celebrating memoir written amid extremely difficult circumstances.
An Irish radio producer tells how she learned to live—and thrive—by the side of a beloved husband diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
When Fitzmaurice first met her filmmaker husband, Simon, she fell in love with a vitality and eloquence that expressed itself in his “dancing hands.” Together they built a bond that was both close and passionate. But during the first decade of living within the happy self-containment of her family “tribe,” Simon suddenly began to limp. Doctors later confirmed that he had MND, a condition that would render him mute and unable to move anything but his eyes. In poetic language, Fitzmaurice recounts the story of how she adjusted to living with a bedridden husband who communicated via an eye-activated computer program. A “merry band” of nurses and caregivers gradually became a permanent feature of her home, as did ventilators and other hospital equipment. Meanwhile, the author oversaw the colorful chaos of living with five small children. Yet at every step of her busy life, she remained all too aware that the only way she could control overwhelming sorrow was to “park it outside of small moments [of peace].” Looking outside the family unit that had once been all she needed to sustain her, Fitzmaurice joined a group of women she came to call “the Tragic Wives’ Swimming Club,” whose members included friends who coped with life-changing challenges that they or their loved ones were facing by diving into the bracing waters of the ocean. The near-constant emotional pain has never left the author, but her achievement, both in life and in this book, is to show the renewing force that her adopted “tribe” and daily swims ultimately became. Though irrevocably changed, Fitzmaurice came to see that the landscape of her life was still every bit as “surprising and beautiful” as it had ever been.
An uplifting, life-celebrating memoir written amid extremely difficult circumstances.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-158-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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