"Waclawiak pivots from the coastal Connecticut setting of The Invaders for a bleak, atmospheric foray through the deserts and valleys around Los Angeles. . .Waclawiak maintains a gloomy tone through well-observed details of the landscape which mixes well with Evelyn’s wry irreverence. This doesn’t promise answers, nor does it give any, and it’s better for it." Publishers Weekly
"[M]oves at a meditative pace. What makes [Life Events] engaging is its narrative voice and its cleareyed assessment of the human condition. . .Contemplative and complex." Kirkus Reviews
"Waclawiak writes with emotional precision and explores the tragedy of existence by masterfully walking the line between suffering and hope." Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed
“Brilliant and exhilarating. Every page of Life Events shines with insight, feeling, and astonishing candor, and not a sentence rings false. I love this novel.” R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
“Every page of this novel is a point of no return; once you’ve read Karolina Waclawiak's Life Events, you will never see life, death, grief, and healing the same way. Waclawiak's mesmerizing storytelling, both painfully funny and joyfully despairing, immediately grabs hold of you and takes you on a ride. And this highway has no exits.”Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives
“Life Events is a masterwork on grief and loss, living and dying, feeling trapped and becoming free. This transcendent novel braided the numbness and the hope of everyday living into a lifeline that pulled me along through each mesmerizing chapter. If you've ever wanted to escape, this stunning book is for you. If you stayed because you knew there could be more, it's also for you.”Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature
"Life Events is a hypnotic novel that beautifully grapples with fundamental questions about how to die and how to live. Karolina Waclawiak transports the reader into the streets of Los Angeles, the deserts of the southwest, the apartments of the dying, and a woman's life at a moment of profound change. Filled with compelling, provocative details about the work of "exit guides" for terminally ill people, Life Events is both a mid-life bildungsroman and a meditation on self-determination. I can't stop thinking about this novel." Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
“In this exquisite novel, Karolina Waclawiak rightfully recasts the American West as the territory of wandering dreams and dreamers and the land where this life and the improbable afterlife most often collide. Life Events is a deeply moving meditation on death and the dying, the fierce weight of marriage and family, and the unrelenting absurdity of being alive.” Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Sonora
2020-03-02
A messy meditation on life in the face of death from the author of The Invaders (2015).
Evelyn is waiting for her parents to die—not looking forward to it but preoccupied with this inevitability for which she does not know how to prepare. She’s also waiting for her marriage to die; she’s given up, but she wants her husband, Bobby, to be the one who asks for a divorce. While she waits for both of these endings, she checks out temporarily by taking long drives around Los Angeles, drinking wine, and hitting her weed pen. She’s searching the web for a grief support group when she finds a program that teaches people how to help the terminally ill die. Training for this task compels Evelyn to think deeply about her own life, as does preparing her clients for death. One of the pleasures of this book is that these experiences do not lead to dramatic revelations. The shifts in Evelyn’s thoughts and behavior are subtle and slow. She never makes an explicit connection between her work as a death doula and her decision to finally leave Bobby, but she begins to take practical steps toward that end. Indeed, the process that Evelyn devises to leave her marriage is similar to the process she uses to ease clients toward their final exits. And both processes are morally, ethically, and emotionally fraught. This is not an action-packed novel, and the narrative moves at a meditative pace. What makes it engaging is its narrative voice and its cleareyed assessment of the human condition. Evelyn is self-aware enough to understand her despair and resilient enough to not succumb to it entirely. This does not mean that she has any idea what she should do in order to feel contented and fulfilled—and it’s not that she hasn’t tried. In a passage in which Evelyn is trying to get her doctor to increase her prescription for a sedative, she considers all the therapists she's sought help from. The obstacle between Evelyn and happiness is not a grand tragedy; it is the accumulated weight of the small tragedies we all endure and carry with us.
Contemplative and complex.