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I’ve been a fan of the author of today’s pick for a minute, from her debut memoir to her various writings for publications like The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine. She writes with heart and earnestness, and her sophomore memoir had me choked up and more enlightened about grief than I was before picking up the book. This is a memoir and then some, an in-the-moment processing and a critique of the systems that fail Americans, a book about going back home and saying goodbye.
A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung
Both of my parents are alive. I count myself lucky, but I’m in my 40s, and with each passing year, my dread of the inevitable increases. Recently, I read Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, which is not a BIPOC book, but it made me think again about losing a parent and reminded me of Nicole Chung’s 2023 follow-up to All You Can Ever Know. While Chung’s debut focused on her experience as a Korean adoptee to white parents, A Living Remedy focuses on grieving said parents. Chung returns to her childhood home to rally around her mother when she’s diagnosed with cancer shortly after her father’s death. Through these trips back home, she bears witness to the ways in which her mother copes with terminal illness, leaning more heavily on religion and members of a congregation to help her as she faces down her own mortality, for one. When her mother enters hospice at the start of the pandemic, Chung wrestles with the challenges of caregiving while living across the country, separated from her mother by distance and the fast-spreading COVID-19 virus. I’ve heard so many heartbreaking stories of families trying to find ways to process their grief together when the pandemic made communal gatherings incredibly dangerous. Chung’s intimate accounting of her own experience emphasizes just how hard and impactful that disconnect can be.
Her story seamlessly weaves the intimate with the big picture when she shares her sharp, cutting perspective on the U.S.’s damaged healthcare system and how it can wreak havoc on families, worse still when their lives and finances are already on the brink. If you were mad about this country’s healthcare before, that rage will be heightened reading about what Chung and her parents endured and how the failings they were victim to speak to a broader conversation about class. These insights remain timely; it’s important for all of us to develop a more clear-eyed view of our nation’s exploitative frameworks, which seem only to be worsening with time.
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