The Stuff of Life: A Daughter's Memoir - Hardcover

Karbo, Karen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582341834 ISBN 13: 9781582341835

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2003

Synopsis

As a generation of baby boomers faces the aging of their parents, Karen Karbo's resonant new memoir tells the intimate story of one stoic father and wiseacre grown-up daughter navigating the last months of his life.

When Karen Karbo's father, a charming, taciturn Clint Eastwood type who lives in a triple-wide in the Nevada desert, is diagnosed with lung cancer, his only daughter rises to the challenge of caring for him. Neither of them is exactly cut out for the job. Karen is a Doc Marten-sporting freelance writer who lives in Portland, Oregon, the primary breadwinner for a slightly chaotic blended family of five, who has always steered clear of the "helping professions." Dick Karbo, a retired industrial designer and card-carrying member of the NRA, is an equally reluctant patient. As Dick's disease progresses, Karen finds herself sometimes the responsible adult, sometimes a stubborn teenager all over again, by turns grief-stricken, rebellious, and amused by the grim ironies of the situation. In the end what father and daughter discover more than anything is the love and the toughness that makes them alike.

Sensitive and ruefully funny, The Stuff of Life invites you into a family as complicated and real as your own, capturing a moment filled with all the sadness and warmth of adult life.

About this title

About the Author

Karen Karbo is the author of three novels, each a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and the nonfiction book Generation Ex: Tales from the Second Wives Club. Her writing has appeared in Vogue, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, the New Republic, and the New York Times, among other publications.

From Publishers Weekly

Karbo achieves the near-impossible with this memoir: she wrangles the potentially depressing subjects of death and a dysfunctional family into a funny, uplifting page-turner. When her kindhearted but curmudgeonly father is diagnosed with lung cancer, Karbo begins the exhausting leapfrog between her husband and three children in Portland, Ore. and his triple-wide in the Nevada desert. Her attempts to discuss the rapidly spreading disease with the world's most uncommunicative patient are indeed valiant, but Karbo's honesty about her partial regression into adolescence is what will distinguish her story from the rest of the cancer caretaker genre. After all, what normal human beings in Karbo's position haven't found themselves "running on the fumes of maturity... still and always the long-suffering sixteen-year-old?" It's refreshing that our tour guide in this country of illness doesn't pretend to be a natural-born Florence Nightingale. Instead, she freely admits, "I have little patience with the necessary routines of caregiving. I trust doctors about as much as I trust mechanics or the retail associate at Nordstrom who tells me I look fabulous in a pair of $1,200 Calvin Klein capri pants, and am a barf-o-phone to boot." Karbo may occasionally hide out in the bathroom-reduced to reading the fake newsprint wallpaper during her father's hour-long coughing jags-but, as the end approaches, no one can argue she isn't a devoted, well-intentioned daughter. She may apologize for being a "blinking, flinching, grief-stricken fool," but this sense of fallibility and honesty could inspire an alternate subtitle for her book: a survival manual for the living.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1582341834
• ISBN 13: 9781582341835
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256