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by Lois Kelly (Author)
A masterfully told portrait of a marriage: the ordinary joy of it, the long, hard ending of it, and the strange, guilty relief of what comes after.
What happens to love when disease slowly takes the person you love? And what happens to you? Lois Kelly didn't set out to answer those questions. She set out to survive them. What she produced is something rarer: a portrait of a marriage in full - the ordinary joy of it, the long, hard ending of it, and the strange, guilty relief of what comes after.
Slow Loss is not a book about illness. It is a book about love - how it bends and buckles and sometimes breaks under unbearable pressure, and how a woman rebuilds herself from the wreckage. With raw honesty and dark humor, Kelly writes about anger, envy, loving someone whose eyes you no longer recognize, and becoming someone you never expected to be. There is no toxic positivity here - only truth and hard-earned wisdom offered with enormous generosity.
Kirkus Reviews calls it "a deeply human story in which love manages to shine through very real pain." Readers will recognize themselves in Kelly's doubts, her fury, her small surrenders, and her hard-won capacity to begin again - whether or not illness has ever touched their lives.
Slow Loss is for readers of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air - anyone drawn to writing that refuses to look away, that finds meaning not despite suffering but from within it. It is the story of one marriage, one disease, one woman's transformation. And somehow, unmistakably, it is also yours.
Brave. Funny. Devastating. True.
