Book Review: Crying in H Mart: A Memoir by Michelle Zauner

 Dear Lit Loves,

I took a break from my book club assigned reading this month because I had already read the book selection.  If that leads me anywhere it will usually be to selecting a book from the memoir genre.  Sure enough, I found Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner and decided to take a chance on it.  I did not know anything about the author except that I think her memoir won the GoodReads Choice Award for best memoir of 2021.  I later learned the author is in a band and has written for several major media publications.  

This memoir is written from the standpoint of a young girl growing up in Eugene, Oregon having a Korean mother and an American father.  Her mother was quite strict with her while she was growing up and her father worked as a used car salesman.  Her mother embraces her Korean heritage through food and lots of it.  That is how she expresses her love for Michelle is through making authentic Korean dishes for her and also, the family goes biannually to visit her mother's family in Seoul.

When Ms. Zauner's mother is diagnosed with cancer, she learns from her father that her mom will begin undergoing treatment in an attempt to slow the cancer.  Her mom has made it clear that after watching her sister die of cancer, she will only give cancer treatment about two rounds and if it has not proven successful in shrinking her cancerous tumors, she wants no further treatment.  When Ms. Zauner is called home by her father who tells her he needs help caring for her mother, we see the visceral shock a daughter experiences upon witnessing a parent in rapidly declining health.  While Ms. Zauner's dad retreats into his own world during this time period, it is Michelle who realizes her mother is becoming sluggish, dehydrated, and emaciated from lack of calorie intake.  Following a local hospitalization, Ms. Zauner's mother is able to come home for a brief time as other female friends arrive to stay with Michelle and her dad to help care for her mother.  

It was heart-breaking at times to read about the final days and moments Michelle shared with her mother as she realizes her mother is quickly nearing the end of her life.  Michelle moves heaven and earth to make her mother happy prior to her passing.  Her mother dies at home in her own surroundings.  The reader then watches as Ms. Zauner stays with her father and tries to clean out her mother's belongings from her childhood home.  And ten months later, Michelle tries to move forward with her life by following her artistic aspirations and continuing to try and embrace the Korean heritage she inherited from her mom.

It's always interesting to witness what we inherit from our parents and how each influenced our lives from what they said or did to their own interests and our later insights into how they raised us as individuals.  A good portion of the book is about the author forging her own identity, but it is also about coming to appreciate a parent's way of displaying love and how he/she has shaped our lives and identity.  The book is also a bird's eye look into what is often the excruciating experience of an adult child losing a parent to an aggressive cancer.  Did we say what we wanted them to know before they left us?  What memories of them shine most brilliantly in our recollections of them?  And this book is also about carrying on the best parts of our parents in ourselves as we try to move on with our lives following their deaths.  How will our parents live on through us as we try and find our way forward in life without them?

This is a moving book.  Having lost a father to a rare cancer, I had to put the book down at times as I remembered my own experiences with my dad in his final days and asked myself what characteristics of his live on through me?  What a moving tribute to her mom this book is.  What a powerful and insightful read.  I highly recommend this book.

Till my next review,

Grace (Amy)

Review: Anxious People: A Novel by Fredrik Backman

 Dear Lit Fanatics,

Wow!  I just finished reading the powerful, realistic fiction book titled Anxious People:  A Novel by Swedish author Fredrik Backman.  I think Mr. Backman must have been a psychology/psychiatry major in college because he always speaks to some aspect of humanity in all of his books.  In Anxious People, the book starts in an unusual manner.  The reader gets little vignettes of the lives of various people who eventually, in the course of day, are all going to find themselves in a highly charged situation.  They are going to come together and share their grievances, secrets, passions, and longings and find connection.  More than that, they are going to have to consider the human condition of desperation and the drastic measures it can prompt a person to take even if the actions cause no one harm.  Over time this group of people will be forced to make a group decision of whether a person they don't know deserves a second chance at redemption.

Initially, the reader is informed that a woman who was having difficulties in her marriage left her husband, but she still wanted to obtain partial custody of her two girls.  Her husband's divorce attorney threatens to take her girls away from her if she cannot provide a stable, safe home.  The problem is that this mother cannot earn enough money to pay rent on a residence where both she and her daughters can live.  She gets to a point where she sees no other recourse but to grab a gun, which she thinks is fake but is actually a real pistol, and she goes to rob a bank asking for the exact amount of rent she needs, no more and no less.  Interestingly, she does not realize the bank she attempts to rob is a cashless bank so her mission is not achieved.  Before the police arrive, the mom runs across the street to a block of apartments and runs inside the first residential door that is open only to find that the apartment is for sale and people are there viewing the apartment in order to potentially buy it.  This bank robber/mom is now holding the apartment viewers as hostages.

This is the point in the book where eight people inside the apartment suddenly get to know one another given the circumstances in which they find themselves.  At the same time a father and son who are both police officers in this small town are attempting to respond to the hostage crisis once the bank robber makes a demand for pizza and fireworks.  The father and son "tolerate" one another and have remained living in the same residence after their wife/mom dies and their daughter/sister has been lost to the ravages of drug addiction.  Additionally, one of the hostages is a banker who does not like her job even though she can do it quite well.  She is also struggling with suicidal thoughts and has carried an envelope from a man who jumped to his death ten years prior, but she has never been able to open the envelope and read it.  She also witnessed one of the police officers, who is currently responding to the hostage crisis, when he helped her present-day psychologist, who at age nine intended to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge.  The police officer in his youth is the individual who kept the young psychologist from committing suicide.  And the connections and commonalities among eight hostages and a bank robber continue to be revealed throughout the remainder of the book.

Essentially, the book is about the interconnectedness of people.  It is also about how as a society we come across people each day and we do not know what is happening in their lives.  What we say or do may impact the actions that person does or does not take.  In a pandemic like we are living in today, people are especially anxious for all sorts of reasons.   Would it not make for a better world if we all were a bit more understanding and considerate toward people we meet whether they be a relative, an acquaintance, or stranger?  It's easy in this social media obsessed age to get wrapped up in ourselves:  our problems, our anxieties, our wants, our needs, etc.  Take time to recognize and lend some thoughtfulness to those you meet along your life journey.  You never know what a difference you might make in that person's life or how much you might have in common or in what ways you might be connected in the future.  This is one fabulous book by a quite insightful author.

Till my next review or reflection,

Grace (Amy)

  

Review: Healing: When A Nurse Becomes A Patient by Theresa Brown, RN

 Dear Lit Loves,

Happy New Year!  In December, I won a giveaway sponsored by GoodReads of the upcoming book release titled Healing:  When A Nurse Becomes A Patient by Theresa Brown, RN.  The "official" release date for the book is April 2022.  I wanted to read this book because Ms. Brown writes about her experience coping with cancer from a nurse's perspective.  And interestingly, she has experience as a nurse on a hospital bone marrow transplant unit as well as a hospice home health nurse.  Given my own experience with skin cancer and chronic illness along with being a caregiver/advocate for my dad who lost his battle with Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma as well as witnessing my mom's experience with breast cancer, this book highly intrigued me.  And it did not disappoint.

Ms. Brown discovers what our health care system experience is like as a breast cancer patient as she already has broad experience as a nurse within the U.S. health care system.  Not only does the book give a sharp-focused summary of the diagnostics and treatment of breast cancer, but it weaves in some of Ms. Brown's experiences as a nurse treating cancer patients as well.  From the initial suspicious mammogram to a breast biopsy, breast surgery, radiation treatment, and aftercare following treatment for breast cancer, the reader gets a firsthand look at what it is like to be diagnosed and treated for breast cancer.  Ms. Brown discovers throughout her cancer journey that our U.S. health care system often lacks compassionate oncology personnel.  From a radiologist who tells the author that the breast mass looks mean to having to wait over a long holiday weekend for biopsy results that are readily available, the reader sees how once a patient receives a cancer diagnosis, that individual's world is tipped over and spinning precariously while everyone else in the world goes about their business because they did not just have their world rocked by a cancer diagnosis.  

Oncology departments are places no one wants to find themselves.  If your cancer treatment involves radiation, you likely will be visiting a radiation oncology department in the basement of a cancer center or hospital.  It's the medical personnel who stop to acknowledge the seriousness of the patient's diagnosis and the fatigue of treatment that often mean the most to cancer patients.  Whether you are a nurse, teacher, corporate CEO, college student, VP of marketing, or truck driver, life changes drastically once you are diagnosed as a cancer patient.  When cancer comes knocking at your front door, your reality gets shaken like a snow globe.  You never forget that moment.  Often a cancer diagnosis feels like a sucker-punch to the stomach and a forearm hitting you in the face.  Cells within your body have gone rogue and it's time to find the best medical oncologist, surgical oncologist, and quite often radiation oncologist.  Cancer patients discover a new reality of medical terms, testing procedures, and treatment plans that are foreign to them and yet, it's time to get ready to step up to the plate and proceed or not with treatment.

For Ms. Brown, the pink associated with breast cancer fundraising is stereotypical almost delegating breast cancer as "only" a female cancer.  We all know that men can experience breast cancer as well.  Breast cancer is more than the color pink.  Breast cancer diagnosis happens all year long and not just the month of October when you often see massive pink campaigns as fundraising is elevated for research and care.  And for Ms. Brown, having breast cancer is not so much a war whereby her body is invaded by foreign aggressors; it is more that suddenly the cells within her own body decided to become negatively activated and then started reproducing incredibly fast with dangerous implications.

Finally, I liked that Ms. Brown addressed how her experience as a cancer patient affected her as she resumed working as a home hospice nurse.  It gave her a whole new perspective on what cancer patients and their families are experiencing when hospice arrives.  And I think Ms. Brown addressed the ambiguity of calling herself a "cancer survivor" if as a patient you are tested on a regular basis to determine if a cancer has recurred.  There is always a constant uneasiness each and every time a cancer patient undergoes blood tests, mammograms as well as CT or PET scans.  Cancer patients always have a nagging notion or worry of is this the test that will demonstrate that a cancer has returned for another round in the ring?

I admired the book and thought it was well-written.  Some of the chapters were quite short compared to others and occasionally the book chapters alternated back and forth between the author's experience with breast cancer versus a memory from her years as an oncology nurse.  For me, I found myself wanting one cohesive story of the breast cancer experience. I found myself often wanting to read about what happened next regarding her cancer experience as opposed to a brief reflection on working as an oncology nurse, but to me as a writer I feel that may have been more of an editing decision than a writer's decision.  I would highly recommend this book!

Till my next review,

Grace (Amy)