Thirty Days

Thirty Days is a portrait of grief, of a marriage and of a family. It is the moving memoir of Mark’s wife of 32 years, Kerryn Baker, who died ten months after her diagnosis, aged 55, from stomach cancer.

It is also a study in how we construct our own version of the past, after Mark discovers a cache of Kerryn’s letters in the laundry cupboard and has to rethink their relationship. It is a book about memory and its uncertainties, as Mark sifts through photos and home movies, as his wife gets sicker, and his search for clues about their relationship grows more desperate.

In her last days, Kerryn reveals her traumatic childhood to Mark for the first time. She emerges as the rock of the family, a brave and wise woman, clear-eyed about her treatment, focused on finding the path to a peaceful death. Paradoxically, her dying brings the couple back to the intensity of their first love.

In the tradition of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Cory Taylor’s remarkable memoir, Dying, Mark Baker’s Thirty Days is an inspirational book about death and dying.