Memoir / Death & Bereavement
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Excerpts
from a Family Medical Dictionary Reckoning with death and love Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary is an intimate, exquisite, and true account of
what it is to help a parent die. After her mother was diagnosed
with terminal cancer, former home care worker and award-winning
writer Rebecca Brown cared for her mother during the last six
months of her life. This spare, unsentimental book comes out
of that experience. In short chapters headed by definitions of
medical terms, she confronts anemia, chemotherapy, metastasis,
cremation. Brown's is a poignant and unflinching story of how
one family coped with loss and learned about the longevity of
love. Reviews: "Rebecca Brown's prose is like Shaker furniture: simple, strong, and useful, in the most beautiful sense. She writes here of loss and love with as much truth as necessary and far more poetry."—Amy Bloom, author of Come to Me "Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary is by someone who is (and should not be) the great secret of American letters, Rebecca Brown. [It is] what great books should be: relevant, urgent, honest, true."—Dale Peck, Interview "Written more like an epic poem, this book is recommended for most library collections." —Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal, July 2003 New York, NY Her book, Excerpts From a Family Medical Dictionary, is a moving testimony of that experience and promises to be a comforting companion to others who may find themselves in Brown's shoes." —Willim R. Wineke Wisconsin State Journal, September 28, 2003 "Honest and profoundly sad, this medical
memoir is a touching triumph." "'Excerpts" takes a stark and measured approach to illness and care, yet its very spareness serves as a springboard for powerful feelings." —Michael Upchurch, SEATTLE TIMES/POST INTELLIGENCER September 28, 2003 "Rebecca Brown gives both her mother
and her readers a true gift of love in penning Excerpts From
a Family Medical Dictionary. Anyone who has lost a mother,
or just wants to read about the experience, will emerge from
this short book profoundly moved a grateful." —CURVE
MAGAZINE, April 2004 San Francisco Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary "Twenty years ago the American short-story writer and novelist Rebecca Brown published her first collection, The Evolution of Darkness, and set off a critical flurry of excitement in the UK, following this with her first two novels, The Haunted House (1986) and The Children's Crusade (1989). Both the early novels, modern mythologies of loss and love intent on revealing the strangeness of the ways we live, suggested Brown was a surreal archivist of broken things, whose fiction read as a new kind of realism, all new sharp edges, a sublime realistic surrealism which worked (and works) to astonishing effect in the tighter harness of the short-story form. The first lines of a story such as "Folie a Deux" are typical: "In the interest of security we agreed to put out your eyes and burn the insides of my ears. This made sure we were always together. Each of us had something the other didn't have." Brown's literary voice, funny and bladed, grieving and surreal, found its moment in the blasting, elegiac 1994 collection The Gifts of the Body, stories about a care worker looking after people with differing stages of Aids, stories where the surreal meets the literal so horrifically that they attain a sense of truthfulness not found in the work of many writers. Her gift of veering so close to the bone creates a brilliance of revelation about death, life and love, and she wrote with a clarity and calmness of voice and eye to which reviewers' words, such as "unflinching", struggled to do justice. Brown is a great writer, a quiet, uneasy trailblazer, who hasn't really received her due of critical attention either here or in the States. Her latest book will probably also be labelled unflinching. In 1997 her mother, Barbara Wildman Brown, became ill with cancer. Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary is a slim memoir charting her illness and death, with Brown in the impossible position of objective/subjective chronicler in a formalised retelling of the gravest surreality of all. Its first chapter, entitled "Anaemia", opens with her mother, a woman used to driving halfway across the US, postponing a trip because of floods and because she's feeling a bit "tired". "When I asked her what she meant, she answered breezily that she'd caught the flu or something in the winter and hadn't quite shaken it yet." Brown comes home to her mother's small western town and takes her to the doctor, who tells her her mother is profoundly anaemic. "Then he repeated, 'profoundly'." From here on, in a conjunction of hindsight, sadness, aftermath and sickening suspense, words shift their meanings and Excerpts becomes inexorably concerned with asking what we mean. Each very short chapter, with its title a word, such as "metastasis", "hydrotherapy" or "illusion", followed by a medical definition of that word, is beautifully composed, resonant, tough, yet casual-seeming, painfully simple, throwaway. "Tremor" traces, in less than 400 words, the numb journey made by Brown on the long haul home to her mother's door, then simply infers the gruelling journey made by her mother across the room to the door to meet her. A chapter called "Incompetence" makes its meaning clear: "She made a living trust so if she became 'incapacitated' or 'incompetent' — those were the lawyer's words — all of us kids could write cheques and have power of attorney and medical attorney." The frankness and blankness of this in the context of what we mean and how we mean it is, very simply, terrifying. This is a dark book written in the grim and oddly lightened space of bereavement. It reads as dark but also as true, moving, lost. Comparable with Simone de Beauvoir's slim and searing memoir of her own mother's dying, A Very Easy Death, Excerpts from a Family Dictionary is readable and untakeable both at once. Its starkness is a kindness. It is a further examination, in Brown's own inimitable psychological realism, of the evolution of the dark, and in its courage there is something both extinguished and lit. In a way this could be the book that Brown, the chronicler of the real-surreal, who has always stripped back the skin of things to show us what's making things work beneath, has always been preparing herself to write." |
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