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Imperfect Endings: A Daughter's Tale of Life and Death
Zoe FitzGerald Carter · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorCrying in H Mart: A Memoir
Michelle Zauner · 256 pages
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her gra
The End of Your Life Book Club
Will Schwalbe · 344 pages
This is the inspiring true story of a son and his mother, who start a "book club" that brings them together as the mother faces an advanced form of pancreatic cancer. The result is a profoundly moving tale of loss that is also a joyful, and often humorous, celebration of life.
Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
Katy Butler · 322 pages
"An exquisitely written, expertly reported memoir and expose; of modern medicine that leads the way to more humane, less invasive end-of-life care based on the author's acclaimed New York Times Magazine piece. This is the story of one daughter's struggle to allow her parents the peaceful, natural deaths they wanted and to investigate the larger forces in medicine that stood in the way. When doctor
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Dave Eggers · 426 pages
From Wikipedia: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (ISBN 0-330-48455-9) is a memoir by Dave Eggers released in 2000. It chronicles his stewardship of younger brother Christopher "Toph" Eggers following the cancer-related deaths of his parents. The book was an enormous commercial and critical success, reaching number one on The New York Times bestseller list and being nominated as a final
Fly Away
Kristin Hannah · 416 pages
A follow-up to "Firefly Lane" returns readers to the world of Tully, Kate, and Tully's mother, who explore their understandings about love, family, loss, and redemption while turning to each other in the hopes of salvaging their lives.
The Long Goodbye
Meghan O'Rourke · 306 pages
In this eloquent, somber memoir about the death of her mother and grieving aftermath, poet and journalist O'Rourke (Halflife) ponders the eternal human question: how do we live with the knowledge that we will one day die?
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying
Nina Riggs · 299 pages
Poet and essayist Nina Riggs was just thirty-seven years old when initially diagnosed with breast cancer—one small spot. Within a year, she received the devastating news that her cancer was terminal. How does a dying person learn to live each day "unattached to outcome"? How does one approach the moments, big and small, with both love and honesty? How does a young mother and wife prepare her two
Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?
Roz Chast · 228 pages
In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. When it came to her elderl
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande · 283 pages
From surgeon and bestselling author Atul Gawande, a book that has the potential to change medicine—and lives. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should. Through eye-opening research
One True Thing
Anna Quindlen · 320 pages
A New York psychiatrist recounts her mother's death for which she was arrested. At the time, Dr. Ellen Gulden was accused of killing her mother with an overdose of morphine, a charge in part based on a high school essay in which she advocated euthanasia. By the author of Object Lessons.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot · 381 pages
Home is Burning
Dan Marshall · 304 pages
"For the Marshalls, laughter is the best medicine. Especially when combined with alcohol, pain pills, excessive cursing, sexual escapades, actual medicine, and more alcohol. Meet Dan Marshall. 25, good job, great girlfriend, and living the dream life in sunny Los Angeles without a care in the world. Until his mother calls. And he ignores it, as you usually do when Mom calls. Then she calls again.
The Faraway Nearby
Rebecca Solnit · 259 pages
A companion to "A Field Guide for Getting Lost" explores the ways that people construct lives from stories and connect to each other through empathy, narrative, and imagination, sharing anecdotes about historical figures and members of the author's own family.
Elsewhere
Richard Russo · 251 pages
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
The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
Madeleine L'Engle · 245 pages
The author describes the senility and death of her ninety-year-old mother and her own concomitant emotions and frustrations.
The End of Eve
Ariel Gore · 239 pages
At age 39, Ariel Gore has everything she's always wanted: a successful writing career, a long-term partnership, a beautiful if tiny home, a daughter in college and a son in preschool. But life's happy endings don't always last. If it's not one thing, after all, it's your mother. Her name is Eve. Her epic temper tantrums have already gotten her banned from three cab companies in Portland. And s
The Longest Trip Home: A Memoir
John Grogan · 334 pages
Mother Daughter Me
Katie Hafner · 286 pages
The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner's memoir of the year she and her mother Helen spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Katie urged Helen, set in her ways at 77, to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoë, Katie's teenage daughter. Filled with fairy-tale hope that she and h
Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me
Sarah Leavitt · 130 pages
Losing Mum and Pup
Christopher Buckley · 251 pages
In twelve months between 2007 and 2008, Christopher Buckley coped with the passing of his father, William F. Buckley, the father of the modern conservative movement, and his mother, Patricia Taylor Buckley, one of New York's most glamorous and colorful socialites. He was their only child and their relationship was close and complicated. Writes Buckley: "They were not - with respect to every oth
The Middle Place
Kelly Corrigan · 272 pages
The thing you need to know about me is that I am George Corrigans daughter, his only daughter. So begins this beautifully written memoir, in which Kelly Corrigan intertwines her own story with that of her larger-than-life, Irish-American, born-salesman fathers, and illustrates both an unbelievably powerful and healing father/daughter relationship and the unbreakable bonds of family. Writing with c
Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Other Four-Letter Words
Michael Ausiello · 309 pages
Television industry journalist Michael Ausiello tells the story of his final year with his partner of thirteen years, Kit Cowan--diagnosed with a rare and very aggressive form of neuroendocrine cancer--while revisiting the many memories that preceded it, and describes how their undeniably powerful bond carried them through all manner of difficulties, with humor always front and center of the relat
Birds Art Life Death: A Field Guide to the Small and Significant
Kyo Maclear · 221 pages
A writer’s search for inspiration, beauty, and solace leads her to birds in this meditation on creativity and life – a field guide to things small and significant. In 2012, Kyo Maclear met a musician with a passion for birds. Curious about what had prompted a young urban artist to suddenly embrace nature she decided to follow him for a year to find out. Observing two artists through seasonal