Positive and genuine, writer Amy Bloom's husband, Brian, sounds like someone anyone would love to know. Sadly, in 2019 he received an Alzheimer's diagnosis and eventually called on Bloom's support as he chose to end his own life before the disease could. This memoir moves gently but cohesively between anecdotes of the past and the journey to Switzerland for the couple's final days together. Bloom provides her own narration, speaking of both her great love and devastating loss with equal parts emotional warmth and quiet composure. Bloom's voice is capable and clear, inspiring admiration for the strength it must have taken not only to write these moments down, but to then read them aloud. The memoir is a loving tribute; Bloom's narration of it is remarkable. L.B.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2022 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss
In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss
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Overview
“A pleasure to read . . . Rarely has a memoir about death been so full of life. . . . Bloom has a talent for mixing the prosaic and profound, the slapstick and the serious.”-USA Today
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Publishers Weekly
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, USA Today, Real Simple, Prospect (UK), She Reads, Kirkus Reviews
Amy Bloom began to notice changes in her husband, Brian: He retired early from a new job he loved; he withdrew from close friendships; he talked mostly about the past. Suddenly, it seemed there was a glass wall between them, and their long walks and talks stopped. Their world was altered forever when an MRI confirmed what they could no longer ignore: Brian had Alzheimer's disease.
Forced to confront the truth of the diagnosis and its impact on the future he had envisioned, Brian was determined to die on his feet, not live on his knees. Supporting each other in their last journey together, Brian and Amy made the unimaginably difficult and painful decision to go to Dignitas, an organization based in Switzerland that empowers a person to end their own life with dignity and peace.
In this heartbreaking and surprising memoir, Bloom sheds light on a part of life we so often shy away from discussing-its ending. Written in Bloom's captivating, insightful voice and with her trademark wit and candor, In Love is an unforgettable portrait of a beautiful marriage, and a boundary-defying love.
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize
Editorial Reviews
★ 11/08/2021
Novelist Bloom (White Houses) looks back on the beauty and turmoil of accompanying her husband through the final days of his life in this deeply moving memoir. When her husband, Brian, was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in 2019, he chose to end his life via assisted suicide at Dignitas in Switzerland. As Bloom writes, she worried “that a better wife, certainly a different wife, would have said no, would have insisted on keeping her husband in this world until his body gave out.” But her love for Brian and his desire for a meaningful end of life drove their mutual agreement to take the steps for him to die on his own terms. With passion and sharp wit, she jumps back and forth between the beginning of their relationship, the Herculean effort it took to secure an agreement with Dignitas, and the painful anticipation of the final trip to Switzerland. Most poignant are the intimate moments they share as they make the most of their last days together. As she writes, “I imagine that Brian feels as alone as I do but I can tell he isn’t as afraid.” The result is a stunning portrayal of how love can reveal itself in life’s most difficult moments. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME. (Mar.)
Bloom has a talent for mixing the prosaic and profound, the slapstick and the serious, which makes the book, despite its depressing subject matter, a pleasure to read. Rarely has a memoir about death been so full of life.”—USA Today
“As with all great books about dying, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss does not terrorize with grim statistics and forewarnings but rather destigmatizes euthanasia and enriches the reader’s life with urgency and gratitude. It renews those joys of being ‘In Love’ with the people around us—despite the numbing effects of routine and familiarity which so often cause happiness to lapse in middle age.”—The Washington Post
“I’m not sure why I hadn’t until now read Bloom’s fiction. . . . Not reading her: my loss. Bloom has one of those warm, wised-up, tolerantly misanthropic New York voices, in the manner of Laurie Colwin and Sloane Crosley and Allegra Goodman and Nora Ephron, and an ability to deepen her tone at will.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Reading this book is, purely and simply, a transcendent experience. In Love is a thrillingly beautiful, laser-eyed book about love, life, mortality, and, most remarkably, the ways in which no one of the three can be separated from the others. Prepare yourself to be heartbroken, expanded, unsettled, and filled with hope.”—Michael Cunningham, author of A Home at the End of the World
“I read In Love in one sitting on a long flight and a flight never went by so fast. I am full of admiration for this important memoir. The mastery of this book draws us in and delivers us, by the last page, changed.”—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club
“In Love is a buoyant and entrancing memoir about one of the worst things that can happen to a couple. Bloom’s unfiltered glimpse into a working marriage is both a touchingly besotted portrait of her husband and a wrenching account of his gradual retreat from her. Their resolute approach to his death yields a story pulsing with raw life.”—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
“This is a beautiful, necessary book for anyone who loves their partner deeply and wonders and worries what the end might be like: poignant, kind, funny, and ultimately redemptive. One cries a lot, in the best of ways.”—Alain de Botton, author of The Course of Love
“A remarkable book from one of the United States’s most consistently brilliant writers . . . The subject is death, so the end is inevitable; but Bloom’s story is full of surprises and some of the most heartbreaking, honest, and funniest writing you’ll ever read.”—Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
“This shimmering love story and road map is must-read testimony. . . . You will never forget this book, and if you do, let’s hope someone close to you remembers.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A stunning portrayal of how love can reveal itself in life’s most difficult moments.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
06/01/2022
Novelist Bloom (White Houses) had been married to her husband, Brian Ameche, for 12 years when he received a devastating diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's. Determined to not suffer from long-term cognitive decline, Brian chooses to end his life peacefully before his condition becomes severe. The lack of options in the United States leads the couple to Dignitas, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, where they spend four final days together before Brian dies, peacefully, in what Dignitas calls an "accompanied suicide." This sort of deeply personal story demands to be narrated by the author, and Bloom's narration is a testament to her deep love for and devotion to Brian. Her conversational tone makes the difficult subject matter accessible, and moments of joy, lightness, and wry humor appear throughout the audiobook. Reflective, thoughtful, and ultimately hopeful, Bloom's memoir is a celebration of a life well lived and of a supportive and loving relationship. VERDICT This moving, powerful tribute to love and loss is a must-listen. Suggest to listeners who appreciated Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air and Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty.—Nanette Donohue
01/01/2022
Known for her introspective fiction (including National Book Award finalist Come to Me), Bloom shares a piece of herself in this first memoir. Bloom gives the reader full access to her experience of coming to terms with the onset of her husband's Alzheimer's disease and his decision to seek physician-assisted death. Bloom interweaves this experience with recollections of their past together as a mid-life couple in which each found their true life partner. Bloom's vivid imagery puts the readers in each scene; although written with a loving heart, this is an honest account that's not seen through rose-colored glasses. Of unique interest is the couple's experience of physician-assisted death, which they had to carry out in Switzerland instead of the United States, where access to assisted death is limited and cumbersome. Far from exploiting her husband's story, Bloom's memoir is a final homage to the man she loved; she says that her husband asked her to write this book because she was the only person who could do it with her particular perspective. VERDICT A memoir that will appeal to many readers as a study on grief, acceptance, relationships, and love. With her background in psychotherapy, Bloom provides clear and vivid insight on going on with life while accepting the loss of a loved one.—Kelly Karst
Positive and genuine, writer Amy Bloom's husband, Brian, sounds like someone anyone would love to know. Sadly, in 2019 he received an Alzheimer's diagnosis and eventually called on Bloom's support as he chose to end his own life before the disease could. This memoir moves gently but cohesively between anecdotes of the past and the journey to Switzerland for the couple's final days together. Bloom provides her own narration, speaking of both her great love and devastating loss with equal parts emotional warmth and quiet composure. Bloom's voice is capable and clear, inspiring admiration for the strength it must have taken not only to write these moments down, but to then read them aloud. The memoir is a loving tribute; Bloom's narration of it is remarkable. L.B.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2022 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
★ 2021-11-16
A beloved fiction writer shares the story of her husband's assisted suicide after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
Readers will be locked into this gorgeously written memoir out of profound sympathy for the decision Bloom's 65-year-old husband made upon learning of his condition. A man who absolutely loved life, Brian immediately asked for help planning an early exit. By that time, the couple had for several years endured the depredations of his failing cognition without knowing why. Bloom describes this period with regret, longing, and her trademark mordant humor: "He has gotten me some really ugly jewelry in the last three years, things that are so far from my taste that, if he were a different man, I’d think he was keeping a seventies-boho, broke-ass mistress in Westville and gave me the enameled copper earrings and bangle he bought for her, by mistake." After researching what the future might hold, they sought the services of Dignitas, a Swiss organization supporting "accompanied suicide." The application process was complex. As one of Bloom's friends joked, "It’s like you do everything you possibly can to get your kid into Harvard and when you do, they kill him." Along with this black humor comes plenty of despair. Sadness and tears suffuse the narrative, and many readers will shed tears of their own. In one heart-wrenching section, the author describes the plight of a family friend who shared Brian’s condition: "She winds up in the care of one of her daughters, and she does not get to Dignitas, because that window probably closed two years earlier, and she will spend the rest of her life in a memory-care unit, and the best outcome I can hope for is that she dies soon. She does not die very soon and when we talk next, she is in the memory-care unit and she says, Something very strange is going on here, please come get me." As Alzheimer's becomes more prevalent, this shimmering love story and road map is must-read testimony.
You will never forget this book, and if you do, let's hope someone close to you remembers.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940176131154 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2022 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 827,238 |
Read an Excerpt
Sunday, January 26, 2020, Zurich, Switzerland
This trip to Zurich is a new, not quite normal version of something Brian and I love: traveling. Road trip, train ride, ferry ride, airplane anywhere. We like all travel and most shopping, and this trip to Zurich has all the accoutrements of our other trips and is also nothing like anything we’ve ever done. As we usually do, we take a car service to the airport so we can be fancy and also avoid the park-and-schlep, and even before Brian had Alzheimer’s, our combined lack of direction adds twenty minutes to all transportation transitions. We have a restaurant meal before our 6 p.m. departure. I buy a stick of lipstick and a small tube of hand cream; Brian buys some candy. We share gum. We share a bottle of water.
On the plane, we enjoy the settling in, the attention of the flight attendants, who already like us because Brian is mindful about his size and doesn’t swing his arm into someone else’s drink and he expresses appreciation to every single Swissair representative. We seem like people who will not be screaming for more booze or more peanuts at midnight. No one loves business class more than people who always fly coach.
We are smiling from the moment we board. I arrange our business-class pods; we are gushingly polite to the attendants. It’s obvious that we like each other and are happy to be traveling together. As soon as we get our beverages (in glasses!), we toast my sister and brother-in-law, who are paying for our business-class trip to Zurich.
Dignitas’s office is in Zurich, and that’s where we’re headed. Dignitas is a Swiss nonprofit organization offering accompanied suicide. For the last twenty-two years, Dignitas has been the only place to go if you are an American citizen who wants to die and if you are not certifiably terminally ill with no more than six months to live. This is the current standard in the United States, even in the nine right-to-die states plus the District of Columbia, about which many older or chronically ill Americans harbor end-of-life fantasies and which I researched, at Brian’s direction, until we discovered that the only place in the world for painless, peaceful, and legal suicide is Dignitas, in the suburbs of Zurich.
My sister had cried with me since the second appointment with the neurologist, when it took the doctor less than an hour to give Brian a mental-status exam and inform us that Brian almost certainly had Alzheimer’s and had probably had it for several years, judging by his high IQ, his struggles with balance and proprioception, and his poor performance on the exam. It took Brian less than a week to decide that the “long goodbye” of Alzheimer’s was not for him and less than a week for me to find Dignitas, at the end of several long Google paths. From summer to winter, my sister, Ellen, who loves me and loved Brian, did her best not to make suggestions, not to offer “if onlys,” not to say that maybe Brian’s Alzheimer’s wouldn’t be too bad or would progress very slowly, not to cry when I wasn’t crying, and not to pour out her own grief at the loss of one of her favorite people and our compatible foursome. (When they met for the first time, fourteen years ago, Brian went into Ellen’s kitchen with his winning ways and said, I really love your sister. My sister didn’t turn around. She said, Hurt her and I will kill you.) Ellen called me early one morning in December, when we were pretty sure that we’d cleared the hurdles for Dignitas, and said, Just tell me what you need. I said, reluctantly, Twenty thousand, and my big sister said, Here’s a check for thirty. We ended up spending every penny of it, between a couple of last big fishing trips for Brian, his not working, my not working, our eating out all the time, sometimes lunch and dinner, at the nicest restaurants in New Haven. We spent it on what was to be our last joint birthday celebration, and on four nights in the five-star hotel in Zurich and the car services and the tours of Zurich and my friend flying to and from Zurich to keep me company on the flight home, on whatever makes bad months bearable, plus the cost of Dignitas itself (around ten thousand dollars all in).
In our Swissair pods, Brian and I toast each other, and we say, Here’s to you, a little hesitantly, instead of what we usually say, Cent’anni (“May we have a hundred years,” a very Italian toast). There is no Cent’anni for us; we won’t make it to our thirteenth wedding anniversary.
We lean closer to each other and then we pull back, each of us fussing with our shoes and carry-ons, each of us opening our little gift bags from the airline and pulling out the socks (yes) and the eye masks (never) and the tiny toothpastes and tiny toothbrushes, which we persist in believing will delight the grandchildren, which they never do.
It is all nearly normal, like so much that we’ve done these last few years, like the flight itself and everything that precedes it—the trip to the airport, the TSA (our petty but deep pleasure at having TSA PreCheck, noting the much longer, shoes-off lines to the left of us), the pretty good meal at JFK. It all seems normal, except that I still remember how different it was to be together, to be with Brian, three years ago, when I didn’t hold my breath from the time he went off to the newsstand until he came back. From the outside, or some kind of inside (the one where I too have no memory of how we used to live our actual life), it is nearly normal.
For the trip to JFK, we didn’t use Arnold, the guy who always drives our car to the airport and returns it to our driveway. Arnold’s been driving us, and our kids and grandkids, for six years, and he has shared with us all about his love of motorcycles, his sobriety, and his wife’s health issues, to balance, I think, all the information he has about us, whether he’s wanted it or not. I could not bear to lie to Arnold about where we are going and I cannot bear to tell him the truth and I could not come up with a half-truth (the favorite technique of serious liars) about why we are going to Zurich in late January. For the skiing? For the ice fishing? For the Chagall windows in Fraumünster Church? I was afraid that Arnold would watch us sympathetically in the rearview mirror, and I could not bear it, for Brian’s pride and my general soft-boiledness, and just as I could not bear any harshness at all, I didn’t think I could take kindness, either. I wanted absolutely nothing, a blanket of indifference, and that was exactly what we got from the driver of our local limo service. He spoke once in the two-and-a-half-hour drive. Perfect.
At JFK, we stood mid–Terminal 4 and agreed on the restaurant, nicer than Shake Shack (which I love and Brian does not) but not as nice as the Palm steakhouse, which seems insanely high-priced, but as I’m writing this, I remember that we did go to the Palm, after all, because . . . obviously.
Brian ordered everything he wanted—and, it seemed to me, everything that anyone can imagine ordering—at the Palm steakhouse at JFK, except vodka on the rocks, which he had been mentioning wanting from time to time for the last year or so.
At the Palm, Brian ordered onion rings and a rare rib eye with a side of hash browns and a Caesar salad and garlic toast and he would have ordered a shrimp cocktail, except that I whispered, like the circa-1953 stage Jewish wife I seem to have become, missing only my home perm and rickrack-trimmed apron: Really? Shrimp in a steak place, in an airport? Brian shrugged, to say: I’m not that excited about airport shrimp anyway and, also, what’s the worst that could happen? I could have a bite, and it’s meh, and then I wouldn’t eat it. Waste of money, so what? I could die from bad shrimp, and wouldn’t that save us all a lot of trouble? Or I could get food poisoning and have to miss the flight. At this, he folded the menu and looked at me the way he often did now, with resigned understanding, fatigue, a little worn humor.
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