Our Long Marvelous Dying
A Novel
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Palliative-care physician and award-winning author Anna DeForest returns with an ode to life and to death, and the ways we care for ourselves and others on our long, marvelous walk toward the end.
In a pandemic-hushed city, a young doctor lives a life of insecure attachments: to a distant partner in an untended marriage, to a loaner child who stirs up hurts from the past, to houseplants wilting in a dark apartment on a once-vibrant street.
Through a yearlong fellowship caring for the dying and their families, death is impossible to ignore, and still more endings loom at every turn—endings made worse by wounded, avoidant doctors who don’t know how to let go. But after the sudden loss of a long-estranged father, our unnamed narrator’s work is thrown into painful relief, and we see, under threats large and small, how far we will go to hold on to our lives—no matter how little we live them.
Lyrical and with piercing insight, Our Long Marvelous Dying is a meditation on the twin drives of life and death—and how all of us reckon, day by day, with their ecstatic, inevitable collide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
DeForest (A History of Present Illness) provides a ruminative if underdeveloped autofictional account of a palliative care doctor during the Covid-19 pandemic. The unnamed narrator works in a Manhattan hospital, where their job is to help terminal patients transition to death. The narrator's home life offers little respite from the emotional strain of daily interactions with the dying. Their grief counselor husband is absent for much of the time, leaving them alone to care for their five-year-old niece while their brother is in rehab. As the narrator's thoughts consistently turn to their recently deceased father, they try to make sense of their estranged relationship. Meanwhile, the virus seeps into every aspect of the narrator's life. The narrative that emerges feels simultaneously like a documentary and a fever dream. Without a plot or much character development, readers may have a tough time becoming emotionally invested. Still, DeForest draws from their own experience as a palliative care doctor to write with acute perception about the thin membrane that separates life from death. Readers of When Breath Becomes Air will want to add this to their shelf.
