Goodbye, Vitamin
A Novel
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4.3 • 8 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction
"A quietly brilliant disquisition . . . told in prose that is so startling in its spare beauty that I found myself thinking about Khong's turns of phrase for days after I finished reading."—Doree Shafrir, The New York Times Book Review
Her life at a crossroads, a young woman goes home again in this funny and inescapably moving debut from a wonderfully original new literary voice.
Freshly disengaged from her fiancé and feeling that life has not turned out quite the way she planned, thirty-year-old Ruth quits her job, leaves town and arrives at her parents’ home to find that situation more complicated than she'd realized. Her father, a prominent history professor, is losing his memory and is only erratically lucid. Ruth’s mother, meanwhile, is lucidly erratic. But as Ruth's father’s condition intensifies, the comedy in her situation takes hold, gently transforming her grief.
Told in captivating glimpses and drawn from a deep well of insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Goodbye, Vitamin pilots through the loss, love, and absurdity of finding one’s footing in this life.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Rachel Khong's debut novel is startlingly clear-eyed and unsentimental about the realities of Alzheimer's impact on families. Freshly dumped, 30-year-old Ruthie Young moves back home to help take care of her ailing father. There, she reconnects with her dad's fading memories of her childhood and peppers her daily journal with small frustrations and sudden insights. Goodbye, Vitamin is at once darkly funny and profoundly moving.
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.
