Goodbye, Vitamin: A Novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, July 11, 2017

I purchased this book based on very encouraging reviews and also the subject matter. For personal and professional reasons, I have an interest in dementia. I have read non-fictional accounts, fiction, and research. Goodbye, Vitamin is a nice addition to the literary work on an illness that will touch most of us in some way. Ms. Khong manages to write with both humor and love about watching a parent lose their memory.Ruth is 30 years old and reluctantly returns home to help her mother care for her father who has Alzheimer’s disease. Ruth quit college to follow her former fiancé out east for medical school. She is working in a hospital as a radiology technician when her fiancé dumps her. Once home, she finds that her mother is trying various pseudoscience practices to stave off the advancement of dementia. She has also emotionally checked out of the family. Her father, fired from his job as a history professor due to erratic behavior, has shut himself in his study. Though he has some major character flaws, especially as a husband, Ruth loves her dad and tries to help him. For example, she and his former students trick him into thinking that he is still employed, which ultimately backfires. Her father begins to share with her the notes that he kept while she was growing up. The notes are full of her observations and precocious questions about life. He asks her to start keeping a record of his days so that they can both remember. Ruth’s younger brother Linus also comes home and together the family learns how to cope with a terminal illness.The novel is told over the course of 13 months, from December to December. It initially starts as a diary, but around July the entries are no longer dated. This book is a very fast read as it is told in snippets of observation and events. However, the writing is sharp, lovely, and humorous. It is best to read slowly and savor the words, puns, and emotions. It takes a skilled writer to respectfully use humor when writing about a serious subject. This book will give you hope as it breaks your heart.

I loved reading this book, I only wish it had been a little longer. Goodbye, Vitamin is about the devastating diagnosis of Alzheimers disease received by university professor, husband, and father Howard Young. Ruth, his daughter, leaves her job in San Francisco to live with her parents for a year to help her mother Annie care for her Dad. This novel explores the complexities of family relationships, how a family cares for each other day to day in the face of serious illness. Even though the subject matter is grave, the book is not overly weighed down with sadness or darkness. The book is written as a diary by Ruth, about day to day life living with a loved one with worsening dementia while also dealing with sadness in her own personal life. It is written almost in a stream of consciousness manner, peppered with random tidbits and insights. Central to the story is a touching ruse to pull Howard out of his depression and get him more engaged in life again. I personally enjoyed the story and style of this book and look forward to more from this author.

Straight up loved Rachel Khong’s novel GOODBYE, VITAMIN. This book has that something, something. It is funny and so touching. You know it is the kind of book you will come back to, if you, like I did, highlight all the hilarious bits and the sweet stuff too.Ruth is at a turning point in her life. She has just, to her surprise, become disengaged from her fiancé, and is on her way home to help her mother take care of her father who is in the early throes of dementia. Her father is aware of what is going on and is not happy about this babysitting situation, nor is he happy that he has just been forced out of the university where he has been a well-regarded professor.Things are prickly at first between the family members. Ruth’s father’s loving diary notes are woven throughout the story, which he kept about Ruth’s words, questions, and curiosity about life while she was growing up. The notes are subtle but show us another side of him and his tenderness toward his daughter. There will be a pivotal point in the book where it all comes together and roles are reversed. It is so tender that you can’t help but fall in love with Ruth and her father.

This is a new favorite because it does a really hard thing and makes it look easy. It's not easy to tell the story of a dying parent without being melodramatic or making him out to be some kind of perfect saint, but not some supervillain, either. It's not easy to show the affection and distance and resentment you can see in your own parents' marriage as a grown-up yourself, to show that you both love and have outgrown the place you grew up, with its Southern California citrus trees and strip malls. It's not easy to tell tell the whole story of a family in such a small space, with all their strangeness and love for each other, and all the ways they hurt each other and care for each other, without making it an epic 700 page book. The way Rachel Khong tells this story in its fragmented, vignette-style chunks, is the exact right way to tell this kind of story. It's how your brain works when you lose someone this way, a little at a time, looking them in the eye and knowing they're not them anymore one day at a time. I'd follow this narrator, who is so funny and smart, so weird and clumsy and heartbroken, through anything, and especially the year she spends making sense of her own heartbreak and figuring out how to navigate the suddenly unfamiliar version of who her dad is now and who she will be after this year is done with her.