All That Was Not Her

All That Was Not Her is a story of a woman and her struggle with chronic illness set in an American city. It is a story about care given and withheld; about dying and the things that take up residence in the aftermath of a life. And it is about an anthropologist-grasping at facts and near-facts as they whiz by in the tumult of loss-who recognizes the improbability of a relationship that lasted well over a decade. Todd Meyers asks, How to speak of and to a subject after death, to produce writing as a form of afterlife?" His answer is an ethnography that is granular, returning to small moments woven through months and years, exposing a fabric of relationships stretched thin by economic poverty, illness, and other crises. All That Was Not Her speaks to concerns in the human sciences about representation, erasure, the difficulty of repair, and letting go"--