New York Times bestseller. "A meditation on sense-making when there's no sense to be made, on letting go when we can't hold on, and on being unafraid even when we're terrified." --Lucy Kalanithi
Thirty-five-year-old Kate Bowler was a professor at the school of divinity at Duke and, after years of trying, had finally had a baby with her childhood sweetheart when she began to feel jabbing pains in her stomach. She lost thirty pounds, chugged antacid, and visited doctors for three months before she was finally diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. As she navigates the aftermath of her diagnosis, Kate pulls the reader deeply into her life, which she populates affectionately with a colorful, often hilarious retinue of friends, mega-church preachers, parents, and doctors, and shares her irreverant, laser-sharp reflections on faith, friendship, love, and death. She wonders why suffering makes her feel like a loser and explores the burden of positivity. Trying to relish the time she still has with her son and husband, she realizes she must cure her habit of "skipping to the end" and planning the next move. A historian of the "American Prosperity Gospel"--the creed of the megachurches that promises believers a cure for tragedy, if they just want it badly enough--Bowler finds that, in the wake of her diagnosis, she craves these same "outrageous certainties." She wants to know why it's so hard just to surrender even when she knows she has no control. She contends with the terrifying fact that, even for her husband and child, she is not the lynchpin of existence, and that without her, life will go on.
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Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Random House (June 4, 2019)
- ISBN-13: 978-0399592089