All Things Consoled: A daughter's memoir

by Elizabeth Hay Narrated by Elizabeth Hay

Overview

From number one best-selling novelist Elizabeth Hay comes a poignant, complex, and hugely resonant memoir about the shift she experienced between being her parents' daughter to their guardian and caregiver.

Jean and Gordon Hay were a formidable pair. She was an artist and superlatively frugal; he was a proud and well-mannered schoolteacher with a temper that could be explosive. Elizabeth, their oldest daughter, was said to be a difficult and selfish child. Elizabeth always suspected she would end up caring for her parents in their final years, a way of making up for the sins of her childhood, proving herself to be a good daughter after all. But as her parents, who had been ferociously independent people, became increasingly dependent on her, their lives changed utterly and so did hers. Philip Roth once said, "Old age is a massacre." All Things Consoled takes you inside the massacre.

In this startlingly beautiful memoir, with brutal candor and irresistible wit, Elizabeth Hay offers insight into the exquisite agony of a family's dynamics - sibling rivalries, miscommunications that spur decades of resentment all matched by true and genuine love and devotion — and reaches a deep understanding of the most unforgettable characters she will ever know, the vivid giants who were her parents.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Winner, Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction
Shortlisted for the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize
A Globe and Mail Top 100 book
A Chatelaine Best Book of 2018

"Hay's prose elevates this ordinary rite of passage—the death of one's parents—to something rare and poetic. All Things Consoled becomes, itself, a consolation for anyone desparing at the loose ends that parents leave behind. Page-after-page this is a masterclass in observation—a lesson in how meaning can emerge from grief." —2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury Citation

"Piercingly candid and exquisitely written, Elizabeth Hay's memoir describes the intensity of the love, uncertainty and exasperation triggered by her parents' dying. Yet there is humour here, too, even—especially—after the final goodbyes." —Charlotte Gray, author of The Promise of Canada

"Elizabeth Hay is a marvel. She honours her parents in this portrait of their final years. As steadfast a daughter as she is a writer, Hay writes with sometimes scalding authenticity about aging and the challenges that come with the end of a life, but she is never less than tender. I loved this moving memoir." —Michael Redhill, author of Bellevue Square

"[All Things Consoled's] tiny scope and narrow focus is its strength. It is quite simply about death and how it both scours us and educates us." —Globe and Mail

"Iconic Canadian author Elizabeth Hay is an accomplished, beautiful and elegant writer and that accomplishment, beauty and elegance are evident in her latest book, All Things Consoled." —Winnipeg Free Press

"In All Things Consoled, Hay chronicles with breathtaking honesty the ravages of age and decline. She also shows how love, beauty and the sustenance of writing are a kind of balm for this reality of the human experience." —CBC Radio

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169066289
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/18/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

     My mother came home the next day. The residence doctor dropped by in the afternoon, sturdy, energetic, reassuring. We had learned he was from Aberdeen, a fact that only endeared him further to my parents, for the Hays traced their origins back to the same part of Scotland. My mother greeted him cheerfully, and he said, “So you’ve come back.”
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "All Things Consoled"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Elizabeth Hay.
Excerpted by permission of McClelland & Stewart.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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