Goodbye, Vitamin
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4.0 • 7 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
An O: the Oprah Magazine and Amazon.com Best Book of 2017
'Khong is a magician ... Brilliant' Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
‘Khong’s first novel sneaks up on you – just like life, illness and heartbreak. And love. A million small, human and often deeply funny details gather force to tell a tale that is ultimately, incredibly poignant’ Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man
Ruth is thirty and her life is falling apart: she and her fiancé are moving house, but he's moving out to live with another woman; her career is going nowhere; and then she learns that her father, a history professor beloved by his students, has Alzheimer’s. At Christmas, her mother begs her to stay on and help. For a year.
Goodbye, Vitamin is the wry, beautifully observed story of a woman at a crossroads, as Ruth and her friends attempt to shore up her father’s career; she and her mother obsess over the ambiguous health benefits – in the absence of a cure – of dried jellyfish supplements and vitamin pills; and they all try to forge a new relationship with the brilliant, childlike, irascible man her father has become.
'A beautifully written debut, dreamy and funny ... flawless' Independent
?'Biting, funny and poignant and makes you wish you’d thought of writing it first' Stylist, '50 Unmissable Books'
'Like a chain of fairy lights in the darkness' Financial Times
'One of the funniest elegiac novels I have ever read' David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language of Cranes
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lucky Peach executive editor Khong's first novel, written in journal format, is a family drama cum breakup story about 30-year-old Ruth, a recently single sonographer struggling to come to terms with the Alzheimer's diagnosis received by her father, Howard. When his behavior worsens (such as wandering over to a neighbor's porch in his underwear), Ruth quits her job in San Francisco to move back in with her parents for a year to keep an eye on things. After Howard, a history professor, is asked to take a leave of absence, Ruth and a few ex-students stage a fake class on the college campus in order to keep his mind engaged, but without alerting the proper authorities. Meanwhile, Ruth starts a budding romance with co-conspirator Theo, finds her parents' signed divorce papers, and digs deeper into her father's extramarital dalliances. Emotions heat up further when Howard's actions progress "from manageable to scary" and he smashes plates, shouts, and throws bedroom pillows into a neighbor's pool. Because of the book's truncated structure and the frequent descriptions of minutiae (catalogs of Ruth's boyfriends postbreakup, patrons at the bar where she and Theo go on a date, facts about Alzheimer's disease), passages seem underdeveloped, especially given the weighty subject matter. Though this foray into a family's attempts to cope mostly skims the surface, it does gain depth as it progresses.
