Book Review: Goodbye, Vitamin

Author: Rachel Khong

Publication Date: July 11, 2017

Publisher: Henry Holt

A young woman returns home to care for her failing father in this fine, funny, and inescapably touching debut, from an affecting and wonderfully original new literary voice.

A few days after Christmas in a small suburb outside of L.A., pairs of a man's pants hang from the trees. The pants belong to Howard Young, a prominent history professor, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Howard's wife, Annie, summons their daughter, Ruth. Freshly disengaged from her fiancé and still broken up about it, feeling that life has not turned out quite the way she planned, thirty-year-old Ruth quits her job and arrives home to find her parents' situation worse than she'd realized. Her father is erratically lucid and her mother, a devoted and creative cook, sees the sources of memory loss in every pot and pan. But as Howard's condition intensifies, the comedy in Ruth's situation takes hold, gently transforming her grief. She throws herself into caretaking: cooking dementia-fighting meals (a feast of jellyfish!), researching supplements, anything to reignite her father's once-notable memory. And when the university finally lets Howard go, Ruth and one of her father's handsome former students take their efforts to help Howard one step too far.

Told in captivating glimpses and drawn from a deep well of insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Goodbye, Vitamin pilots through the loss, love, and absurdity of finding one's footing in this life.

"What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers. That the reasons we can care for one another can have nothing to do with the person cared for. That it has only to do with who we were around that person—what we felt about that person."

“…all of a sudden it didn’t matter what you remembered or didn’t, and the remembering - it occurred to me – was irrelevant. All that mattered was that the day was nice – was what it was.”

Today you were so readily impressed by me.

How can a book that is so short and so simple be packed with so much beauty, realism, and powerful themes surrounding life, family, friendship, and understanding. Ruth, the main character, has journeyed home at the request of her mother in order to help care for her father who has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Ruth is recently untethered from her fiancé and is struggling to “restart” herself without the man she thought would never betray her. She agrees to stay for the year and in that year learns more about herself than she ever intended to. There are moments of humor, reflection, frustration, and beautiful emotion; there are moments where I found myself having to pause to reflect on my own life and my own thoughts on the findings and revelations of Ruth and her family and friends.

The best thing about this book is that it is essentially about a family’s journey through good times as well as difficult ones. Anyone who has suffered from the loss of a family member with an illness similar to Alzheimer’s may have a hard time reading this novel, but it is so worth it in the end. I am very close with my parents, so this book pulled on all my heartstrings. Ruth has a hard time watching her father’s memories slip away and it is powerful and completely mesmerizing to watch Ruth learn to cope with all that is crumbling around her. This book is short and sweet and full of some pretty powerful themes and just downright real life feelings.

***A free copy of this book was provided to me by the publishers at Henry Holt in exchange for my honest review***