Our Long Marvelous Dying

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.

About the Author

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

"DeForest, a palliative care physician, has delivered ... a meditation on both life and death leavened by occasional sardonic humor. Short, dark, stylish, sui generis." —Kirkus Reviews

"Gripping ... There is a whiff of Edgar Allan Poe: a preoccupation with death, an unmoored narrator, a deadly pandemic spread invisibly by a breath or a cough ... DeForest has created a bleak yet powerful account of the toll of dying on family members and health professionals who care for the almost-dead." —Booklist (starred)

"In Our Long Marvelous Dying, DeForest challenges our discomfort with death and instead leads with loss and our search for meaning within it." —Margo Peyton, Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine

"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

"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

Dimensions: 13.46 x 1.91 x 18.67 cm