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Sign up todayOur Long Marvelous Dying
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Learn moreBookseller recommendation
“Author Anna DeForest's work as a palliative care doctor qualifies her as well-positioned to write a literary fiction piece regarding one new doctor's experience practicing during the pandemic. Our Long Marvelous Dying shares human struggles those in healthcare encounter with the backdrop of a floundering marriage and dying houseplants. Our narrator finds exquisite beauty in the layers that are shed as we die and pushes back against the traditional way to care for those at the end of their life.”
— Rachel • Avid Bookshop
Bookseller recommendation
“A fascinating work of auto fiction that calls to mind the genre-bending work of Annie Ernaux. Instead of focusing on the minutiae of a relationship, however, DeForest examines how we, as humans, face and live with death and dying. Ostensibly a year in the life of a palliative care doctor, the unnamed narrator weaves together regrets from her own past with those of her patients, experiences of humaneness in the face of the terror of Covid, finding the simple joys and essential horrors that comprise what it means to know that one’s life is closing in on the end. Finding solace in brief moments of travel and discovering anxiety in her home life, she continues to fight to balance these extremes and to find an inner calm in the chaos that is what it means to live in NYC in 2023. The book feels at times like a documentary, the reader experiencing things right alongside the narrator and being surprised at memories that arise to certain situations. This is a powerful feat of storytelling that will re-establish a sense of humanity both for the narrator as well as the reader.”
— Jesse • Odyssey Bookshop
Bookseller recommendation
“A fascinating work of auto fiction that calls to mind the genre-bending work of Annie Ernaux. Instead of focusing on the minutiae of a relationship, however, DeForest examines how we, as humans, face and live with death and dying. Ostensibly a year in the life of a palliative care doctor, the unnamed narrator weaves together regrets from her own past with those of her patients, experiences of humaneness in the face of the terror of Covid, finding the simple joys and essential horrors that comprise what it means to know that one’s life is closing in on the end. Finding solace in brief moments of travel and discovering anxiety in her home life, she continues to fight to balance these extremes and to find an inner calm in the chaos that is what it means to live in NYC in 2023. The book feels at times like a documentary, the reader experiencing things right alongside the narrator and being surprised at memories that arise to certain situations. This is a powerful feat of storytelling that will re-establish a sense of humanity both for the narrator as well as the reader.”
— Roxanne • Odyssey Bookshop
Palliative-care physician and award-winning author Anna DeForest returns with an ode to life and to death, and the ways we care for ourselves and others on our long, marvelous walk toward the end.
In a pandemic-hushed city, a young doctor lives a life of insecure attachments: to a distant partner in an untended marriage, to a loaner child who stirs up hurts from the past, to houseplants wilting in a dark apartment on a once-vibrant street.
Through a yearlong fellowship caring for the dying and their families, death is impossible to ignore, and still more endings loom at every turn—endings made worse by wounded, avoidant doctors who don’t know how to let go. But after the sudden loss of a long-estranged father, our unnamed narrator’s work is thrown into painful relief, and we see, under threats large and small, how far we will go to hold on to our lives—no matter how little we live them.
Lyrical and with piercing insight, Our Long Marvelous Dying is a meditation on the twin drives of life and death—and how all of us reckon, day by day, with their ecstatic, inevitable collide.
Anna DeForest is also the author of the novel A History of Present Illness. Anna has an MFA from Brooklyn College and an MD from Columbia University and works as a palliative care physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
Reviews
“An existential thriller—fast-paced, tender-hearted and brutally funny, this novel will haunt you long after you finish it. I would read DeForest on my deathbed.”—Jenny Offill, author of Weather “Our Long Marvelous Dying solidifies Anna DeForest’s place as a cool and stylish prose master of striking and exquisite sentences that refuse to turn away from what others deny; a meditation on love and dying, grief and living, and the beautiful, shattering ways they are all entwined. I raced through this book with a heart-stricken propulsion, spellbound to the gutting last line. DeForest is a remarkable talent.”—Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot and Heartbroke “A voice as intimate, as clarion, and as unbeholden as Anna DeForest’s—large-souled, sorrow-seasoned, scathingly truthful—comes along only every few generations. In the tensed, starkly precise sentences of Our Long Marvelous Dying, DeForest levels with us about loss and its aftershocks—the lifelong clouts of a bullying parent’s withheld love, the first meekest rumblings of alienation in a marriage, the hospitalized body’s relentless determination to be done with itself. Here is another triumph from a writer of seemingly limitless empathy, brilliance, and fortitude.”—Garielle Lutz, author of The Complete Gary Lutz “Our Long Marvelous Dying is the type of book we need much more of right now. A book that truly looks at the present moment in a way that makes us better prepared to face it. This sophomore effort confirms my sense of Anna DeForest as one of America’s best new writers.”—Matthew Salesses, author of The Sense of Wonder and Craft in the Real World “Anna DeForest’s Our Long Marvelous Dying gives us a novelist fully in command of their instrument, staring searchingly at death without the dubious veils of euphemism or willed obliviousness. We see dying in the macro—a young doctor navigating a global death event exacerbated by myriad social and political pathologies—set against more quotidian deaths: passion crumbling within a relationship, personal agency eroding as a child is unexpectedly taken in. But what elevates Our Long Marvelous Dying into the realm of the rapturously readable is DeForest’s uncanny gift for lyric language. One can almost pick out voices—Patacara, Lorca, Durkheim, Kahlo—with whom Our Long Marvelous Dying speaks. A true artist brings an impossible thing into utter clarity; with this novel, DeForest enters with singular vision into a species-old conversation about what happens—to the dead and to the living—when we die.”—Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr! “DeForest draws from [their] own experience as a palliative care doctor to write with acute perception about the thin membrane that separates life from death. Readers of When Breath Becomes Air will want to add this to their shelf.”—Publishers Weekly Expand reviews
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