Science historian and TED Fellow Braitman (Animal Madness, 2014) directs the Writing and Storytelling Program at Stanford University's School of Medicine. In this memoir, she addresses the central tragedy of her life. Beginning when she was three years old and until his death just prior to her high-school graduation, Braitman's father struggled against a voracious form of cancer. An accomplished surgeon, he used his knowledge and connections to stay one step ahead of the disease as long as possible, but the cost was high. He suffered through multiple surgeries, including amputations, as the cancer returned year after year. The author recounts these events in lacerating detail and then moves decades forward to her stark realization at 36 that she never actually recovered from this loss. Braitman then recounts her work with grieving children, who teach her to reconsider the lessons she learned from her father's life and death, leading to a new perspective, love, and the ability to mourn her dying mother. Readers struggling with grief will identify strongly with Braitman's story.

Memoir of a young life punctuated by devastating grief. "I am extraordinarily privileged in nearly every way, but what I'm most grateful for now is my parents' belief, passed down like any other inheritance, that there's more beauty in the world than horror." So writes Braitman, director of the Writing and Storytelling Program at the Stanford University School of Medicine and author of Animal Madness, who experienced plenty of horror in childhood, as her father, a surgeon who wanted more than anything else to be an avocado rancher, found himself stricken with an aggressive bone cancer. It was a "death sentence in 1981," when "chemotherapy for bone cancer was new and toxic, still in the experimental stage." Though he outlived the odds, he eventually succumbed. Braitman writes movingly about how he kept appearing in often wonderful ways in her life, such as the bespoke stitches he left as his signature in the hearts of his patients. "The book of the heart is immortal," she writes. "Or at least it's longer than we think." His death, like all deaths, was an occasion for lack of closure, and it did not help much in preparing the author for the deaths of other loved ones. There are a few unsatisfying turns as Braitman grasps for direction and love against the knowledge, hardly secret, that everyone we know will die and everything we know will disappear, but eventually she resolves herself, mostly, to that truth. Some moments are a little forced, but, after a spell of world traveling, earning a doctorate, racking up honors and achievements, and, most of all, enduring the ordinary griefs of life, the author has prevailed. One of her closing realizations is worth the cover price alone: "There is no such thing as happily ever after. There is only happily sad or sadly happy." An affecting investigation of loss, sorrow, and the search for meaning. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In this inspiring memoir, science writer Braitman (Animal Madness) digs into her early experiences with loss to illuminate how grief shaped her well into her adulthood. Raised on an idyllic Southern California ranch populated with peacocks and burros, Braitman learned lessons of survival and courage from her father, a surgeon who died of cancer just as she was preparing for college. The author promptly put her head down and barreled through a series of academic and professional milestones until several painful losses forced her to reckon with the unspoken fears that underpinned her relationship to ambition, success, and love. "Sometimes, what looks like bravery is just us being scared of something else even more," she writes of her eventual realization. Braitman's experiences led her on a pilgrimage with stops at a center for grieving children, a consultation with a psychic, and a naked solo spiritual fast in New Mexico, all in service of reacquainting herself with long-buried emotions. Her prose is shot through with rigor and intellectual curiosity, resulting in a candid study of one woman's long path to emotional peace. This is perfect for anyone looking to heal a broken heart. Agent: Barney Karpfinger, Karpfinger Agency. (Mar.)