Three Good Cries: When Breath Becomes Air; Blackout; My Name is Lucy Barton

Each of these relatively short books is a tear-jerker in its own very different way.  I hope to have some more upbeat options to recommend soon, but there is value in each of the choices below that shouldn't be ignored just because they might make you sad.

In order of importance:

When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalinithi

(with a beautiful epilogue by Lucy Kalinithi)

256 pages

Kalanithi's memoir, written as he is finishing his residency in neurosurgery and undergoing treatment for terminal lung cancer, is absolutely brilliant. I'm certainly not the first to recommend it to everyone with blood running through their veins - I've seen the book recommended in every publication I read (it was even in People!), and it has been touted by Ann Patchett and likened to Oliver Sachs' and Atul Gawande's work.

This is not "just" a book about cancer.  Kalinithi was an English major and a doctor - a likely unique, and necessary combination of interests and talents.  He writes poetically and simply about his love of literature, and his desire to connect medicine to an understanding of humanity, in all its complexity.  No easy task, while also finishing training as a highly sought-after brain surgeon.

One of Kalinithi's goals was to write a book, which he hadn't had time for as a neurosurgical resident who had also completed a fellowship in neuroscience.  After his shocking diagnosis - he was only 36 years old - the impetus to put what he had learned about life on paper became more urgent.  The result is a thoughtful consideration on caring for patients and the meaning of life, and a testament of love to his wife and baby daughter.  (The couple's decision to visit a fertility clinic to conceive after Paul's diagnosis, but before the ravages of chemotherapy, is so hopeful and hits like a sucker punch).

This memoir highlights how brutally unfair the world can be, while making you grateful that Kalinithi was not only able to accomplish incredible feats as a doctor in the time he was alive, but was also able to give readers the precious gift of his reflections and honesty.

I can't eloquently put into words how close this memoir, and his wife's gorgeous writing, made me feel to Kalinithi and his family, who are strangers.  Suffice it to say that When Breath Becomes Air is very powerful, hard-to-forget, poignant, and devastatingly important.

Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, Sarah Hepola

240 pages

I heard Sarah Hepola's interview on Fresh Air and read her article on online dating before deciding to try a Kindle sample of Blackout.  A memoir about a woman overcoming alcoholism doesn't sound like entertainment, but like the interview and article, I found the sample to be so unexpectedly engaging and, in a perverse way, amusing, that I had to buy it.

Hepola is a witty, funny writer who you will immediately want to be friends with.  The ability to make someone laugh while writing about difficult and embarrassing episodes is a great talent, and Hepola is terrifically interesting.  She's a writer and editor for Salon!  She is best friends with Bobby Flay's ex-wife, one of a seemingly unlimited number of friends!  She spent years as a journalist in Texas and New York City and, in a particularly memorable vignette, Paris!  How could this woman ever think that she wanted or needed alcohol to be the life of the party?  

It is an achievement that Hepola makes her story and her disease so accessible and relatable, and that she has exposed many painful secrets in a glaring light.  What's more, she has written a narrative that has (we hope) an obvious ending, and somehow made it into a page-turner that defies cliché.

My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout
209 pages

This was another book that I caught wind of by listening to Strout's interview on Fresh Air.  What I enjoyed even more than the book was the revelation that Strout didn't become a full-time published novelist until she was 43, while teaching at a Manhattan community college after having graduated from law school, practicing law for 6 months, hating it, and quitting.  As she shares in the interview, she had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and had miniseries rights purchased by HBO for her novels Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys, by the time she was 58.

Of the three books I've reviewed in this post, My Name is Lucy Barton is probably the least entertaining or essential.  I didn't find it nearly as engrossing as Olive Kitteridge (both the book and the excellent miniseries).

But that's not to say that I didn't appreciate the book, and how fully enveloped I became in Lucy's story and her fully-realized character.  Much of the book takes place when Lucy is at a Manhattan hospital for an extended period, seriously ill, when her husband won't visit (hating hospitals - don't we all?), and she is terribly lonely and misses her two small girls.  

The heart of the novel is Lucy's unexpected, multi-day visit from her estranged mother.  The reasons for her familial estrangement, the details of her impoverished and possibly abusive childhood and her later success as a writer, and her experience navigating her new family and new city in adulthood, all feel like interesting, but ultimately unnecessary, background.

The book comes most alive when Lucy and her mother re-hash stories of neighborhood acquaintances.  Strout cuts to the quick of a universal mother-daughter relationship, in all its emotional highs and lows, so well that the truth of the relationship brought me to tears.