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.
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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.
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Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!