by Marilyn French (1998)
Marilyn French takes us into the private hell that became her life when, in 1992, after a series of false diagnoses, it was determined that she had esophageal cancer - from the grueling regimen of radiation and chemotherapy to the subsequent coma from which it was thought she had no chance of recovering, to the even more serious post-coma illnesses, to her miraculous return to life. With the insight, intelligence, and emotional honesty with which she has examined so many other women's lives in her fiction, Marilyn French now considers her own, as she battles with doctors and the medical establishment; as her family and friends surround her, giving her mysterious strength; and as she defies all diagnoses and prognostications and emerges whole and more than ever open to life. While this book is a consideration of what it feels like to be dying, and as such it is a musing on death, it is also centered on life: death has cast a mark on life which gives us a new vision of meaning and purpose. As French examines death's role in her life, she shares a sense of what pain and suffering can mean to a person who utterly denies transcendent thought, of how an experience of closeness to death affects the life we are living now.
Patrick and Heather Doughtie
Tyler writes a letter asking God to help him find the compass he has misplaced, but on his way to send it he meets others who could use some help and adds a series of postscripts. Includes a biography of the real Tyler and instructions on writing your own letter to God.
traducción de Mariano Antolín Rato
This work is the author's memoir of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape. Anyone familiar with the author's fiction will recognize Gloversville, New York, once famous for producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a good-time, second-fiddle father who were born into this close-knit community. But by the time of his childhood in the 1950s, prosperity was inexorably being replaced by poverty and illness (often tannery-related), everyone barely scraping by under a very low horizon. A world elsewhere was the dream his mother instilled in Rick, and strived for herself, and their subsequent adventures and tribulations, recounted here, only to prove lifelong, as would Gloversville's fearsome grasp on them both.
Joan Didion
In this memoir, the author shares her observations about her daughter as well as her own thoughts and fears about having children and growing old, in a personal account that discusses her daughter's wedding and her feelings of failure as a parent. It opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana's wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana's childhood, in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were missed or perhaps displaced. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept.
Joseph Heller & Speed Vogel
(Auto)-biographical book (with Speed Vogel), documenting the period of illness starting with December 1981, when Heller was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome. The two friends write alternate chapters, chronicling that period and dire situation with humour. Heller was to recover, eventually, and re-marry with the nurse who saw him through his illness.