“This memoir of suddenly losing a kid is hard to rate. It doesnât feel good to give it stars or not stars because itâs hard to escape the idea that the experience and the expression are intertwined.
So Iâll just talk about it a little.
The book wasnât the best read. Itâs a little disjointed and feels a little like a list of things the characters did.
Which completely makes sense and is a good expression of whatâs so weird and hard and sad about something like this. When you go through something awful, you notice how weird it is that you do stuff like laundry, and how weird it is that you still have to do laundry even though youâre going through this thing.
It feels like the relentlessness of life should stop at least for a little bit, but it doesnât.
So this book feels like an honest and accurate depiction of that, how chaotic and weird it is to grieve and still be a person who lives in real life.
And in that way, itâs a success.
But I think for me, the reading of it was probably not the equal of the creation of it. I think the reader experience is that of someone watching this guy go through some shit, and youâre sort of repulsed and scared by how deep the grief goes and by how helpless you are to do anything.
What it ends up feeling like, as a reader, is youâre with this guy whoâs in the thick of some heavy shit. And heâs helping you shovel snow in your driveway, and while youâre present for him, youâre also noticing that his shoveling ainât so hot in this moment. Of course youâre not going to say anything, but if you look at it objectively, just as shoveling, youâre not thrilled with the job. “