Counting Backwards
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4.6 • 13 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Rabbits for Food comes a profound and deeply moving new novel about a middle-aged couple's struggle with the husband’s descent into early onset Lewy Body dementia, shot through with Kirshenbaum’s signature lacerating humor.
“Gutsy, funny, heart-wrenching.”—The New York Times Book Review
It begins with hallucinations. From their living room window, Leo sees a man on stilts, an acting troupe, a pair of swans paddling on the Manhattan streets below. Then he’s unable to perform simple tasks and experiences a host of other erratic disturbances, none of which his doctors can explain. Leo, fifty-three, a research scientist, and Addie, a collage artist, have a loving and happy marriage. They’d planned on many more years of work and travel, dinner with friends, quiet evenings at home with the cat. But as Leo’s periods of lucidity become rarer, those dreams fall away.
Eventually, Leo is diagnosed with early onset dementia in the form of Lewy body disease. When an uncharacteristic act of violence makes it clear that he cannot live at home, he moves first to an assisted living facility and then to a small apartment with a caretaker, where, over time, he descends into full cognitive decline. For years, all Addie can do is watch him die—too soon, and yet not soon enough.
Kirshenbaum captures the pair’s final years, months, and days in short scenes that burn with despair, rage, and dark humor, tracking the brutal destruction of the disease as well as the moments of love and beauty that still exist for them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kirshenbaum (Rabbits for Food) offers a deeply moving and playfully arch narrative of an artist dealing with her husband's mental and physical decline. A typical "internal weather report" for Addie, a middle-aged New Yorker, is "overcast with anxiety." Her husband, Leo, who runs a university medical research lab, begins showing signs of dementia in his early 50s. Addie tries to meet his changes with humor, as when he hallucinates Mahatma Gandhi outside their window ("Is he wearing anything more than a dhoti?" she says, adding, "You might want to bring him a coat"). At a low point, she calls a suicide hotline. She finds occasional relief by going out for drinks with a suave man named Z, whose departure for Europe angers her, and she mocks Z for calling Europe "the continent." After Leo is diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, Kirshenbaum sardonically outlines the disease's seven stages, showing how Addie's reaction to the news mirrors the various stages of grief, beginning with denial. The bulk of the story is delivered in Addie's crisp second-person narration and her interstitial journal entries, in which she remarks on Leo's transformation ("Asks if I want to go to Times Sq. to watch the ball drop* / *Stark raving mad question"). Kirshenbaum puts her lively wit to good use, tempering the sadness of her drawn-out depiction of Leo's deterioration and Addie's attempts to wrap her head around the ultimately lonely nature of existence. It's a tour de force.
Customer Reviews
Counting Backwards
For many years I have experienced anxiety and dread regarding getting dementia. Dementia,my mother’s side, goes all the way back to her great grandmother, only to wind its way into my grandmother’s brain, my grandmother’s mother, my grandmother and finally into my mother. It’s logical ( in my opinion ) I’m next in line to get dementia unless something else kills me first. This book was soothing, because while his wife was suffering, her husband was happy. The wife had a godsend in her husband’s caregiver, but the wife struggled with guilt. I’m an artist. The wife is an artist, which also made this book soothing, because she did continue to make art despite her sorrow over her husband’s dementia. This novel was not in the least bit depressing. It was uplifting, filled with hope.