Many years ago when the one and only book club I've ever been in was slowly disbanding (we all had young kids and/or babies, and we also played bunco together, so another monthly meeting—and the husband negotiations required—just felt like too much), my friend Michelle handed me a little slip of paper, on which she'd written "Joanne Harris" and Chocolat. "You should read this," she told me, "I think this writer is exactly the kind you like."

(Knowing the types of books a reader-friend likes is, I think, the mark of a true friend. Especially those who can follow my convoluted and perhaps snobby reasons for why I like a book or an author.)

I checked it out from the library (the library where I now work, and how weird is this: I got my library card in 1993, right after we moved into our house, and I have several memories of reading library books but almost no memories of going to the library before 1999) and I read it and I discovered she was right: Joanne Harris fits exactly in to my literary aesthetic. (In case you’re wondering, (the novel is considerably better—less treacly, much darker—than the movie.) Her characters are women I would like to be: not afraid to be alone and not exactly lonely, at least not always; independent and unusual and appealing in a non-traditional sense. Plus she describes food so well. (Which isn't a requirement for me to like a novel, but it certainly doesn't hurt.) Her writing is elegant, I'd say, and plus: "set in Europe" always seems to resonate with me.

But I had no idea, until doing some library research, that she's also written some young adult fantasy novels based on Norse mythology. Upon learning of this, I immediately brought home one of them, Runemarks, and started reading.

Runemarks tells the story of Maddy Smith, who lives in the post-Ragnarok European world, where dreaming is forbidden because it invites the gods to return, where strangeness is immediately suspect, and where magic, magic especially, is taboo. Which is bad for Maddy, since she is marked with a rune and has learned, from a wandering old man who sometimes comes to the small village near the hill marked with a red horse where she lives, magic.

The tale starts as many fantasy stories do, with a misunderstood, mostly-unloved-but-stronger-for-it protagonist. Whom I promptly fell in love with; Maddy is confident but not brash, and caring, and energetic. I love that part of the Hero's Journey, the part where the young hero is learning from the old mentor, but this isn't the crux of the story; instead, it's when Maddy accidentally calls something from the underworld, and things start to stir.

Many years ago when the one and only book club I've ever been in was slowly disbanding (we all had young kids and/or babies, and we also played bunco together, so another monthly meeting—and the husband negotiations required—just felt like too much), my friend Michelle handed me a little slip of paper, on which she'd written "Joanne Harris" and Chocolat. "You should read this," she told me, "I think this writer is exactly the kind you like."

(Knowing the types of books a reader-friend likes is, I think, the mark of a true friend. Especially those who can follow my convoluted and perhaps snobby reasons for why I like a book or an author.)

I checked it out from the library (the library where I now work, and how weird is this: I got my library card in 1994, right after we moved into our house, and I have several memories of reading library books but almost no memories of going to the library before 1999) and I read it and I discovered she was right: Joanne Harris fits exactly in to my literary aesthetic. Her characters are women I would like to be: alone, but not exactly lonely, at least not always; independent and unusual and appealing in a non-traditional sense. Plus she describes food so well. (Which isn't a requirement for me to like a novel, but it certainly doesn't hurt.) Her writing is elegant, I'd say, and plus: "set in Europe" always seems to resonate with me.

But I had no idea, until doing some library research, that she's also written some young adult fantasy novels based on Norse mythology. Upon learning of this, I immediately brought home one of them, Runemarks, and started reading.

Runemarks tells the story of Maddy Smith, who lives in a post-Ragnarok European world, where dreaming is forbidden because it invites the gods to return, where strangeness is immediately suspect, and where magic, magic especially, is taboo. Which is bad for Maddy, since she is marked with a rune and has learned, from a wandering old man who sometimes comes to the small village near the hill marked with a red horse where she lives, magic.

The tale starts as many fantasy stories do, with a misunderstood, mostly-unloved-but-stronger-for-it protagonist. Whom I promptly fell in love with; Maddy is confident but not brash, and caring, and energetic. I love that part of the Hero's Journey, the part where the young hero is learning from the old mentor, but this isn't the crux of the story; instead, it's when Maddy accidentally calls something from the underworld, and things start to stir.

From there it is a tale full of the Aesir and Vanir brought to life. Not regal, Godly life, though: these are human gods, despite their magical feather cloaks and shapeshifting abilities, with jealousy and anger and grudges and fears. It's a complex tale, but one full of adventure and mythological journeys and characters having to figure out how to save themselves.

I totally loved it.

The older I get, though, the harder it is for me to know if a certain (teen) book will actually be loved by teenagers. I loved it because it immersed me in the Norse tradition and by doing so helped me connect with what other, similar books have done differently while still using the tropes. (It is not, for example, a true Norse tale of one character or another doesn't find themselves wandering in a vast underground space of some sort, be it a mine or a cave.) I'm not sure that would resonate with teen readers like it did for me, and it is, like I wrote, a complicated tale.

But I think anyone who's read ​Rick Riordan's novels, and certainly Nancy Farmer's books or Kelley Armstrong's newest series, will love this stand-alone story.

A few years ago in Relief Society (the women’s organization of the LDS church), something infuriating happened to me that made me vow to change how I react. We had a lesson about modesty—never my favorite lesson to teach, let alone listen to, as I think our rhetoric places too much blame on women’s bodies and not enough responsibility on men’s thoughts. But I sat through the meeting, gritting my teeth a little bit, until one of the women in the class raised her hand to make a comment. “The mothers of teenage girls in our ward need to set a better example,” she declared, “at dressing modestly. There is just too much skin shown here, and who else will these girls learn from if not their mothers?”

I sat for a few seconds in stunned silence. I knew exactly who she was talking about: me and a few other women (not of whom, actually, have teenage daughters anymore) who dress…I don’t know. In pencil skirts, in skirts that skim our knees, in tops that show our structure. I don’t think I’m immodest. Maybe she thinks my clothes are too tight or my skirt is too short, but mostly I don’t care because A—I dress to make myself happy, not anyone else and B—I am teaching my daughter (and my sons, for that matter) that what matters most is our voice and how we use it, not our external appearance. But instead of saying anything, I blushed. I felt, for a second, literal shame. And then I felt annoyance and frustration and resentment, and instead of saying anything I just walked out of the class for a few minutes.

But this isn’t a post about modesty.

That Sunday afternoon, that women’s comments, but mostly my lack of courage, changed me. I went home fuming and was ranting to Kendell about it when he asked me what my response was. And I had to tell him: my response was silence.

And silence is implicit agreement.

I decided that day that I will not be silent any longer. I don’t want to be aggressive or antagonistic, but God gave me a brain, thoughts, and opinions, and just because they might not coincide with the majority way of thinking doesn’t mean they aren’t valid.

For the most part, I have stuck to the promise I made to myself. Then, a few months ago, I was asked to be the gospel doctrine teacher.

And for the entire week before my first lesson, I thought about that Sunday experience, about how often I doubt myself because my normal thought pattern or response is so wildly different than a “typical” Mormon’s. For many years I have let this truth make me feel less-than. But I am learning that it doesn’t. Sitting in a room with people who only echo back what everyone else says isn’t learning. It’s not really thinking, it’s just going through the motions.

So I made another decision—another promise to myself: If they want me to teach Sunday School, I will happily teach it. But they called me, not pretend-Amy, the one who is silent because she thinks her non-typical response might offend someone or, even worse, make people think she is weird. I am weird, I am different, I am the person my choices and experiences have created. And I’m not a mirror, reflecting back what everyone thinks they already know. I’m a person, and I will teach with my personality, my experiences, my truths; I will share my ideas even if they are different than what everyone else might think.

I think I have done that so far. Or, at least, I am getting better at it. I know my every-other-week classes aren’t the Amy Show. The classes should be about learning and understanding the doctrine of the church. So I have strived for a balance and I haven’t always shared my most radical thoughts. But I have stayed true to what I know.

In today’s lesson, we discussed this scripture:

Yea, verily I say unto you, if ye will come unto me ye shall have eternal life. Behold, mine arm of mercy is extended towards you, and whosoever will come, him will I receive; and blessed are those who come unto me. (3 Nephi 9:14)

I love this scripture.

It is Christ inviting us. It is Christ telling us how we can find Him: we just have to take his hand. So much is implied. Namely, that it is a choice. He doesn’t say “you have to come to me.” He says if. He gives us room to choose, and in that space all the difference is made for me.

And He also says this word, this ungainly but infinitely important word: whosoever. He doesn’t say All of you who are perfect can come to me. Or All of you who haven’t ever sinned, not really, you can come. He doesn’t say “only men” (even though that “him” might suggest that), he doesn’t say “only white people,” he doesn’t say “only those with the correct lineage.” He just says whosoever.

Whosoever choses.

I discussed this. And then I discussed my dad, who was a good man raised by an agnostic mother, who struggled with many things about the church, who went to the coffee shop nearly every morning of his adult existence. And I can’t help but think what if? What if someone had made it clear that he, too, could come unto Christ, even though he drank coffee?

Then I suggested to the class that we have to be better at this.

But I didn’t stay entirely true to my goal of being regular Amy instead of pretending-I’m-a-real-Mormon Amy. Because what I wanted to say is this:

I think as a church we are horrible at encouraging people to come to Christ. I mean, sure. We encourage each other, all of us who go to church. But we have ideas about who can really come unto Christ. As a woman, I have felt it harder to reach out and grab his arm of mercy, because it seems that men have all the real power and Christ, after all, is a man. As a person with a rather brightly checkered past, I have felt I couldn’t really come unto Christ, because sure: repentance and atonement, but deep down I don’t really feel the same as the blithely non-checkered I am surrounded with.

But it is, of course, bigger than me. Because what if my dad could’ve been loved and welcomed at church, despite his coffee drinking? What if your friend who drinks beer could also come to church and not feel like someone’s project, but just like a member of the congregation? What if we all only worried about bringing our own selves to Christ, and assumed everyone else was also worthy of bringing themselves to Christ?

Because Christ Himself told us: whosoever.

I was a little bit brave—suggesting that my dad should’ve been loved and embraced by our home congregation. Some people even nodded in agreement.

But I wish I would’ve been more forceful. I wish I would’ve been braver. I wish I would’ve said: we need to love more freely. Even though part of how we come unto Christ is through our obedience, everyone is learning different truths at different times. Everyone is somewhere within the process of reaching to grasp Christ’s hand. And feeling loved and accepted by the people around us makes it so much easier to reach out.

Christ doesn’t want us to wait until we’re “good enough” to reach for Him. It is through coming to Him that we reach different levels of goodness. That is why those who do reach for Him are blessed, and as a church we need to encourage all of the reachers, rather than batting their hands away and telling them to come back when they are all worthy.

Because we are all worthy—even me in my pencil skirt and flouncy top, with my baggage and my mistakes and my history.

And maybe that’s why I needed to say what I didn’t say in my lesson, and why I am writing it now: because I also needed to be reminded that all can come to Christ.

I’m thinking about Kaleb this morning. Kaleb and Halloween and also another October morning, eleven years ago, when Kaleb was just a baby and I decided to put out the Halloween decorations.

Obviously he didn’t really do much that year, but every year after that, he’s been my Halloween compatriot. He went through a phase when the scary decorations for sale at stores would terrify him, but he still wanted me to push the cart through them anyway. He loved looking at costumes, talking about what he’d be for the year and remembering what he was in previous years.

He always helped me put out the Halloween decorations.

This year, though, he’s pretty much over Halloween. He doesn’t want to wear a costume that is hot, has a mask or any props to carry, or is uncomfortable in any way. He hasn’t looked at costumes in stores. And when I asked him if he wanted to help me put out the Halloween decorations on Sunday, he shrugged and said “no…it’s too early anyway.”

And my Halloween-loving heart broke a little bit.

The next day, I had a conversation with my oldest niece, who recently turned thirty and decided that her recent baby—her seventh!—would be her last. She talked about how she’d watched me struggle with being “done,” but how she could see that I eventually made peace with it, and that helped her decide her family was complete. I smiled and nodded and hugged her, but really: what happened isn’t what she thinks happened.

People talk about that—about realizing that they felt “done” with the size of their family, knowing that they were finished with babies when their last baby was born.

Maybe from the outside it looked like I had that experience, too. But really, I didn’t. I never felt done. I have always felt like I was missing a child, in between Nathan and Kaleb. What I had to make peace with was the fact that I will always live with that feeling, that I missed someone along the way.

And yes: I do feel done with babies. I have for a long time. But I think that other feeling, the one of missing a person, of my family feeling incomplete (a gap that is impossible to fill) makes it harder for me at every phase of Kaleb’s life. Harder to let go and move on, because each time he moves on I remember that it really is over. My days of anticipating another new life coming to me. That missing child is entwined with Kaleb in ways that are hard for me to explain but still undeniable. Maybe because he was just one baby but had to take the place of two.

This morning I decided that I’d put out the Halloween decorations. It’s the first time in my life, since I became an adult with actual Halloween decorations to put out, that I did it myself. Each little object is wrapped with memories, visible only to me, of each of my kids, but they are strongest with Kaleb because he is the last, and he was the one who cared about it the longest. I set out the pumpkins, the ghosts, my Catrina witch from Mexico, the Halloween quilts, the Halloween cats. I washed the Halloween dishes and spread out the Halloween tablecloth. I remembered all of the little things I own an love that are imbued with Halloween memories. And I thought, and I remembered, and I tried to put into words what I was feeling.

Yes: I’m done with babies. And I am happy with the place I am at in my life. But sometimes that old sorrow grabs me, like it did this morning. How does a grown woman find herself weeping over a Halloween cat and a fleur-de-lis pumpkin? It’s to do with regret, with looking back and wishing I could have held on longer, somehow, to those fleeting days of having littles. They were hard days, but good ones, too, just like right now is also hard and also good. But what I wouldn’t give, even though I am done with babies, even though I have made peace with carrying the missing—even though, what I wouldn’t give to be able to scoop up that baby right out of the photo and hold him in my arms and smell his neck and hear his little sounds.

What my niece doesn’t know, what time will teach her, is that while you can come to a place where you are done with babies, there will always be things that remind you how much you loved babies. And then you will remember that there will never be any more for you, and even with the peace, even with the goodness, there is still, also, sadness. You might be done with babies…but you are never done with your babies.

This hasn’t been a fantastic year of reading for me so far.

I mean…I’ve read things I’ve liked. Some things I’ve loved pieces of, and I was tremendously moved by When Breath Becomes Air. But I haven’t been changed or ravished by any book.

Evrything’s just been OK.

(Which might say something about my emotional state this year as it has been, let’s face it, one of the most difficult times of my life. But A—that’s a topic for a different post and B—I refuse to believe that fiction, good fiction, is weaker than my troubles. I just haven’t found the right books.)

On last week’s trip to New York, I took along a copy of A Man Called Ove, mostly because I remembered, in the ten minutes or so I had at Barnes and Noble to find a book, that several of my bookish, blogging friends had loved it.

So I grabbed it and bought it and started reading it the second night of our trip. (We took the red eye to New York, during which I put my super power—I can sleep through anything—to great use, instead of reading like I usually do on a flight.)

And I was astounded.

Because it is as if the author, Fredrik Backman, took out my husband’s spirit and stuck it into a grumpy old Swedish man.

That’s right: I’m totally married to Ove.

The details are different, of course. Since our cultures are different. But Kendell hates cats, and has heart troubles, and is good with fixing things. But mostly it's the grumpiness, the ranting, and the being annoyed by people’s incompetence, and the frustration over the unfairness of stupid charges like parking: totally the same. That dropped-jaw surprise of people just not knowing how to do something practical. And the anger, which seems like bitterness but really is just a way of coping with the difficult things life has given him. Just like Kendell.

As is the fact that, when push comes to shove, he’ll always help someone out. He’ll grumble, of course, but he’ll do it.

I read most of the book on the flight home, and then almost the rest of it once I’d gotten ahead of the travel laundry. I confess that I was probably less patient with Kendell during those days of reading, because it was like living in stereophonic grumpiness, grumpiness squared, caught in a grumpy sandwich with Kendell and Ove as the bread. (Crusty bread, obviously!)

I finished it sitting in the parking lot of Kaleb’s elementary school while I waited for the morning drop-off to finish so I could go pay his lunch money.

But I had to make myself presentable because the ending killed me. I sobbed—hard.

Because here’s the story: Ove is a grumpy old man living in Sweden, a widow who was recently forced to retire; so he’s decided his life is over and he is going to kill himself. But life keeps intervening. Life, in fact, brings a whole slew of new people into his world. He’s still grumpy, but they love him anyway. And as the story progresses, you learn about Ove’s life and experiences, and you start to see why he is grumpy, why he expects people to be self-sufficient, why he is annoyed at incompetence.

It made me think so much about my own marriage. About the people—mostly my mom and sister—who have said, in different ways but over and over again, that I am wasting my life to stick around a grumpy husband.

In the book, Ove’s wife Sonja is a bibliophile. She loves books, and has many, and even though this is a mystery to Ove, who doesn’t enjoy reading in the slightest (see: more bits of Kendell’s psyche), he builds her a bookcase.

That’s how Kendell is, too. He doesn’t, for example, understand why I like scrapbooking. But he still, in his grumpy way, supports me in doing it. He mostly doesn’t say much at my purchases and my stash. He puts up with the messes I make. And—he builds me bookcases. He put together an Ikea one just this weekend, properly of course, with all the screws in the right place.

He doesn’t get it but he’ll still help me do it.

That’s why Sonja stayed. And it’s why I stay, too. Because yes: I get eternally, bone-deep exhausted sometimes about the things he gets argumentative about. I don’t want to spend my emotional energy the way he does. But I also know that he is, despite his grumpiness, a good man whose life has brought him hard things. His coping mechanisms might not be the most pleasant…but they don’t negate the goodness.

I’m not sure I can say A Man Called Ove is really literature in the high, cultured, difficult sense. It’s a good story told well. But I loved it, for its characters and its slightly-ironic tone and its structure. I loved it because it acknowledges a truth in my life by putting it into the form of a story: It is hard to love a curmudgeon, and they quite often act in ways they shouldn't, but there is worth in it as well as underneath all that prickliness is something good and sweet and true. It does feel like it will be the novel I will remember the most from 2016, because it reminded me to be more patient, and also to be more quick to walk away from or to joke about the grumpiness (instead of engaging it by arguing back). It reminded me to look for the ways that Kendell shows me he loves me, even if he growls when he’s doing it. It made me have more faith in my choice, despite what my sister and mom think, to stay married to a curmudgeon.

Even especially curmudgeons need love, and I can give it to him.

I think gymnastics is a hard subject to make stories out of.  Not that there aren’t a ton of stories within the sport, there are, but it’s difficult to get it right. You can’t have a casual knowledge of the sport to make it come alive in a novel; you have to understand the details, the aches and injuries and how gymnasts go on anyway, the politics (Oh! the politics, throw a bunch of mostly-wealthy parents into a gym where they’re trying to make sure their daughters become the next Big Gymnastics Deal and you can’t even imagine the politics, it’s knee-deep in the parents’ seats, and that’s not even taking into account the interactions between coaches and athletes, who gets whose attention, who never gets any attention…), the drama, the leotard difficulties, the body issues, not to mention all the technical terms and what they mean. On the other hand, if a story is too enmeshed in the gymnastics world, it’s difficult for a reader who hasn’t been immersed in gymnastics to understand or imagine (or maybe even care) what is going on.

I suppose the specificities for any sport are the same. But somehow, gymnastics seems…rarified. Everyone watches football at some point in their life, and basketball. Probably most Americans have had to even play a little bit of basketball, and volleyball, and baseball, even if it was just in seventh grade PE class. Everyone’s had to run around a track or do the pacer. Most sports are experienced by many people, but gymnastics is not really a shared social experience.

It seems less accessible and so more difficult to work into a novel.

But if anyone could write a novel about gymnastics it would be Megan Abbott, who’s also written a novel based on cheerleading—and managed to make this anti-cheerleader love it. She has a way of writing a story wherein she brings a type of community to life and then casts a glaring light on its imperfections, by way of her characters’ stories. That her books are mysteries hardly matters; they are each studies of human darkness.

(I loved this book...but I really don't love the cover.)

You Will Know Me, her newest book which I read in three days and then carried around in my bag trying to write about, is set in the gymnastics community. Devon Knox is an up-and-coming gymnast, just on the edge of making it into the national level. Her parents, Katie and Eric, have been as devoted to Devon’s achievements as she has, mortgaging and re-mortgaging their house, sliding into debt, sitting through meets and workouts. The stress is worth the possibility of Devon following the plan devised by her coach, a pathway to the Olympics. But when a boy associated with the gym is killed, the plan is nearly derailed.

When I first read about this book and started eagerly anticipating it, I imagined it would be told through Devon’s perspective, but it isn’t; the story comes through Devon’s parents. In this sense, the story becomes less about the gymnasts and more about what it is like to have an up-and-coming gymnast as your daughter. Gymnastics is an expensive sport, especially at the elite level. Six-hour-long workouts six days a week is just the start; there’s also grips and wrist guards and tape and beam shoes, practice leos and competition leos (the ones the 2016 Olympic gymnasts wore were rumored to cost $1200), travel costs and meet fees and USGF fees. Private tutors if your kid can’t fit school in.  The Knoxes solidly middle class, so the gymnastics expenses put a strain on their relationship.

But expenses aren’t the only strain. Marriage is hard enough in regular families; adding the tension and pressure of creating a world-class athlete and readers can quickly see how the marriage comes to be centered not on the couple but on their hopes (and ambitions) for their daughter. Which is less like a marriage and more like a sports contract.

Writing the story through Eric and Katie’s perspective changes this novel entirely, so it wasn’t what I expected, but I think that makes it more accessible. It made me dig around a thing I have fairly complicated feelings for, which always surges during Olympics summers. My parents did a lot of sacrificing so I could be a gymnast, and I still have a deeply-seated guilt that I let them down by quitting when I was 16. They sacrificed so that I could earn a college scholarship, and I didn’t do that, so it feels like their sacrifice was for nothing. But there is also the other coin: I didn’t try to sacrifice much of anything for my own kids to become world-class athletes. On one hand, I feel so strongly that it is not healthy for kids, including teenagers, to be so wrapped up in their sport that they don’t have an identity without it. Consider Nathan, who loves playing basketball but also loves other things like rock climbing and art. He played on some basketball teams when he was younger, but he didn’t dedicate himself to it for his whole growing-up years. Now that he’s in high school he’s finding it problematic to make any headway with his team, not necessarily because of his skills but because he doesn’t want to be all basketball all the time. I feel guilty about this because maybe if *I* pushed harder, if I were like the parents that Olympians speak of—the ones who sacrificed everything for their children—then my kids would…I don’t know. Be Olympians? Are the parents who help create Olympic athletes (or even college-scholarship athletes) better parents than the rest of us? Just more determined? Wealthier?

See—it’s complicated. I just know something true about the sports we do as kids and teenagers: they end. There is always a last meet or game; eventually you have to stop. And I know that the vacuum in my life that I created when I left gymnastics was devastating to me. I couldn’t keep doing the sport, but I didn’t know who I was without it, and figuring that out was pretty rough.

(Parts of my psyche still haven’t learned, as evidenced by how often I wake up from a gymnastics dream and then cry in my bed for a little while; my body still wants to move in those ways and probably a part of me will always long for it.)

And that, friends, is why this review has taken me so long to write: because I am the perfect reader for this book. I know enough about gymnastics to know that she gets the details right, and I love good writing enough to recognize good writing.

But I don’t think you have to be the perfect reader to love this book. Or even really know about gymnastics. I think parents, spouses, people who have ever competed in any sport will like it, as will mystery fans.

It’s definitely one of my top-ten favorites this year.

This has been a strange year of reading for me. I have read books...books I have even liked a lot. But nothing that I have really, really loved and adored and couldn't stop thinking about.

And definitely nothing cheery (if you were looking for that kind of thing). Quite possibly my favorite book so far has been When Breath Becomes Air, which is about a person dying from cancer. I've read a whole series about the end of the world, and a couple of books about rape, and one with possibly the saddest ending ever. It seems my reading choices aren't the cheeriest of topics.

I suppose, though, that they never really are. Cheery doesn't usually grab my attention, but The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly did. It tells the story of Minnow, who has escaped from the religious cult she's been living with since she was five or six. Escaped, except her hands have been amputated.

Minnow is put into a young adult detention center for a crime that you get the story about as the novel progresses. A criminal psychologist is assigned to her case, and he makes a deal with her: if she tells him the whole story about what happened to the rest of the cult—how did the fire start that burned down the encampment, how did the leader die—he will give her a positive review when she comes up for parole.

This book had one of my favorite supporting characters in a long time, Angel, who is a long-term detainee in the detention center and likely to graduate straight on to prison. She teaches Minnow not just how to survive in the DT, but in the world at large. Angel has a curious mind, and she loves science and astronomy, the perfect foil to Minnow's long years of a made-up and troublesome religion. It had a demented and terrifying protagonist, the Prophet under whose sway so many people fall. It had disappointing parents who manage, at the last possible moment, to help Minnow instead of punish her. And one character, Jude, whose existence I just couldn't believe in; it seemed improbable to me that a section of mountain woods would hold not just an entire religious community, but a father and his son living in a backwoods cabin, staying off the grid and away from society.

But I still liked this book.

For me, the best part was seeing Minnow realize that if she was going to be saved—from the cult, from her circumstances at the DT—she would have to save herself. Part of this she accomplishes with the knowledge that she's gaining from Angel, about how the world really (literally) works. Part of it is simply her, her courage and her innate sense of...I want to say "goodness," but that isn't exactly it. Minnow wants to do what seems right, even if it is hard, but she's also angry—at her parents, at the Prophet, and the system. I would've liked this far less if she was angelic and forgiving.

This wasn't any easy book to read; the physical punishments in the religious society, as well as the Prophet's downright creepiness, definitely are not cheery. But I am glad I read it; I think Minnow's haunting story will stay with me.

In the foreward to the book When Breath Becomes Air, Abraham Verghese says that by reading the book, we "see what courage sounds like," and then he encourages readers to listen and then, "in the silences between his words, listen to what you have to say back." This is what I have to say back.

In some of my book reviews, I am able to write strictly about the book. But, for the majority of the books I read, my response is so intertwined with my life experiences that sometimes I can't separate the two. When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi,​ which I read about a week after Kendell came home from the hospital, ​is one of those books that is completely inseparable; my response to and interaction with it are entirely woven with what I was experiencing in my life when I read it. You might think that, so soon after my husband nearly dying, I might want to avoid a book about the process of a man dying.

But it was exactly the right book for me at that time.

So this "book review" is more about me and my experiences and how they interact with the book, as well as some of my thoughts on the process of dying, than it is about the book itself. 

When Breath Becomes Air is the memoir of a neurosurgeon who, just when he is finishing his training, discovers he has lung cancer. The book explores not just his regiment of cancer treatments and process of dying—these are, in fact, not the book's focus—but his explorations as a doctor of what death means, of how we die, and, most importantly, what it means to be alive. When does life end and death begin?

Recent experiences aside, this has always been an intriguing question for me. The process of my dad's death—a day or so of hospice care at home—felt remarkably like the process of birth: some medical interaction, family members coming and going, the final moments with only the most relevant people witnessing the last breath. (The difference, of course, being that it was the last breath instead of the first.) All of it felt imbued with humanness, with a sense of this being one of the things that happens to people. I know it isn't always this way, but for him it was a process, wherein he very slowly left; the last breath was subtle. But it was also a thing I felt very strongly: he was there, and then he wasn't. That is what the book's title suggests to me, how breathing—an activity—simply becomes air moving, which is passive.

For my dad, even before he was actively dying, his breath had, on a certain level, become air. Breathing only happened because his brain made it happen, even though if his mind could have told us, it certainly would have said "stop."

There is a huge variety of other reasons this happens, though. Brain death is slow or quick, depending; sometimes the brain can keep the breathing going, and sometimes it is only a machine moving the air. If it is only a machine, is the person still "alive"? Even if the brain is controlling the breathing, but there is no real thought process—is that person still "alive"? What does "alive" really mean?

I think that, had I read this book before Kendell's cardiac arrest, I would have thought about it during those days when he was in his medical coma. What I was grateful for during those awful hours was the conversations we had had, many times over the past eight years of his surgeries, about death, dying, and what limitations we want to live with. We each have an advanced medical directive, and because Kendell and I had talked so often about getting trapped in uncooperative bodies, I knew exactly what he would want me to do: let him go.

At critical medical junctures, Kalanithi writes, "the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living. . . Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurological problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?" I don't want to just be breathing and taking up space, here in body if not in mind. I also don't want my husband to go through that, either, because I know what, for him, makes life meaningful: being productive, doing things, going on hikes, taking care of his family. 

This book made me think about my answers to that question: what makes life meaningful enough to go on living? If I couldn't hike or run anymore, but I could still walk and talk and write and be with the people I love, would that be enough? If I could be physically active but my mind wasn't working well enough that I could still talk, read, write, and be creative, would that? What real, literal limitations am I willing to live with and what could I not live without?

(This is, of course, in a hypothetical situation where we could choose. During that hospital wait with Kendell, it felt like there was a tiny chance he would be OK, and a tiny chance that he would die, and an enormous possibility of being "alive"—air moving through his lungs—but not himself, and honestly: that was what terrified me the most. It was the thing I prayed the hardest for: don't let him get stuck. )

In the end, I finished this book feeling like I had had a conversation with a friend who understood me and my thoughts about death—and life. Dr. Kalanithi was, in addition to being a neurosurgeon, interested in literature, a life-long reader. He does what I imagine I would do if confronted by cancer: turn to books. Not for a cure, but for an emotional solution, a way both to escape and cope. The conversation doesn't feel finished—he didn't have enough time to write the book he wanted—and it is one I will continue having with my family. But it is also one I think our society needs to begin discussing: just because we can​ save a life, should we? Is the quality of existence worth the quantity of months we give them? When is medicine trying to do more than it can? 

As his illness progressed, Dr. Kalanithi realized that he "lived in a different world, a more ancient one, where human action paled against superhuman forces, a world that was more Greek tragedy than Shakespeare." This is because when you have any sort of life-altering medical condition, it feels like most of your choice is removed. There isn't a lot of action you can take. You can't choose yourself well. You can't just decide to get better. And often the choices you can make are either-or situations where both sides have difficulties. There are no easy choices.

But death—death. The older I get, the more firmly I believe that death, in many situations, should be a choice, should be a thing, or quite possibly the very thing, that a patient gets to control, as much as possible. I know that not everyone will agree with me, that suffering can be viewed as a normal part of life, that other people's suffering give us each a chance to serve. But all of that is an outsider observing, rather than experiencing, the suffering. When it ends should be the patient's choice, and for me and my husband, we have decided that living in interminable suffering, or even just a lingering state of nothingness, is not for us.

When Breath Becomes Air isn't really about any of what I just wrote. It's not an argument for euthanasia, even though what I found within it made me consider my position. It is a book that is both simple and profound; entirely moving and unforgettable, sad yet life-affirming, gentle and at the same time stark. People die; we stop existing. How we die, and when, is a part of our lives that we need to discuss and plan for, while at the same time using our ability to choose to create extraordinary things with the life we do have.