Edi is dying of ovarian cancer and she’s craving the lemon cake she once got from Dean & Deluca deli in New York in the mid-1990s. Her forever best friend Ash is keeping vigil by Eli’s bedside in the Graceful Shepherd Hospice in western Massachusetts, trying to track down that elusive cake and keep Edi happy and comfortable with juice, lip balm and company. She’s also ‘whoring around’ (Ash’s words) with a variety of inappropriate people: the palliative care doctor, a substitute teacher from her daughters’ old school, and Edi’s brother. Then there’s her own not-quite-ex-husband, Honey…
That’s the set up for the US memoirist and journalist Catherine Newman’s first adult novel. It’s semi-autobiographical (the dying part, not the whoring: Newman’s own best friend died of ovarian cancer) and wildly readable: a Pringles tube of a book. That’s not an accidental analogy: there’s so much food, you might need a Gaviscon on hand.
Edi and Ash have the wisecracking conversational rhythm of a long-established double act, creating a chatty bubble of love, reminiscences and jokes in Edi’s room. Their duo is leavened by regular appearances from family members and a cast of hospice characters (Ruth, who watches Fiddler on the Roof on a loop, the Ukrainian nurse Olga, Dr Soprano, always pinching food, and a dog called Farah Fawcett). It all makes for a comforting, pacy read; so much so, you forget occasionally where it’s heading, which is clever. The step-changes in Edi’s condition as she deteriorates sucker punch the reader as they do Ash: suddenly you want it to stop galloping along quite so entertainingly.
There’s much else that is good about this book. Newman is understatedly sharp on Ash’s failure ‘to stay in the deep thrum of the profound’; the way that hunger, desire, and inconsequential minutiae – life – always intervene. She conjures the dreamy out-of-time, slow minutes and too-fast weeks of terminal illness: the YouTube videos, naps and snacks; the guilty need to escape and feel alive. There’s a plain truth in her observation that dying and the loss of someone being dead are ‘two different burdens’: ‘It’s like we’ve all been digging and digging, shovelling out a hole, and we can finally stop. Only now there’s this hole here.’
Newman doesn’t skip the bodily realities either: disconnecting tubes, frequently escaping fluids, constipation and Edi’s incipient moustache. ‘What if she died while I was tweezering out her moustache hairs?’, Ash wonders, as Edi’s brother riffs on the Donne poem: ‘Death be not so messy and exhausting.’ She’s funny, too: there’s a great off-topic riff on a choking seagull spoiling an idyllic view, and another on a male artist making lichen sculptures while his wife deals with ‘like, 15 children’ that tickled me enormously. The morphine pump is called ‘Harbinger’; and when Edi asks ‘Is this it?’, it turns out she just wants to know if there’s more San Pellegrino in the fridge.
But, my god, everyone is so nice. Barring Edi’s ‘problematic dad’ (who barely figures), they’re all kind and generously understanding. It is true that death can strip back layers of pettiness and resentment and give a clearer sense of the essentials. But people also remain people, flawed and annoying. I struggled with the notion that Edi’s husband would leave Ash to take care of her (he stays behind in New York with their son) without more pain and jealousy. Then Ash’s partners are gentle; her parents supportive; her daughters brilliant and compassionate and Honey endlessly forgiving.
I wonder if the autobiographical nature of Newman’s story has had an inhibiting effect: if you make someone a bit ghastly, there’s a danger readers will assume they really were. Whatever the reason, it makes the narrative delicious but marginally cloying, like the Velveeta melted over potato chips the hospice nurses call ‘house nachos’. Without that grit and friction, this wise, funny novel isn’t the perfect pearl it could be.
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