The Pharmacist's Mate [Hardcover]

Amy Fusselman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2001

Fusselman's first book weaves surprising beauty out of diverse strands: death and sea shanties, guns and artifical insemination, World War II and AC/DC. Highly personal but always engaging, this book reveals the humor and beauty throughout Fusselman's grief following her father's death. Original cover art by Marcel Dzama.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"It is impossible not to surrender to Amy Fusselman's lovely, haunting voice and strange meditations." -- Amanda Davis

"Ms. Fusselman's book, brief as it is, affected me deeply. Not only that, the talent displayed therein was somewhat unnerving." -- Zadie Smith

"One of the best books about loss I've ever read." -- Rosie O'Donnell

About the Author

Amy Fusselman's writing has appeared in McSweeney's, Artnews, and Jane. She lives in New York City with her husband and son. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 86 pages
• Publisher: McSweeney's; First Edition edition (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0970335539
• ISBN-13: 978-0970335531
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,233,622 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Amazing, Brave, Honest Book, June 23, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Pharmacist's Mate (Hardcover)

I never write these reviews, but I just read the one about how Amy Fusselman was commercializing her grief, and I was sickened. That reviewer is obviously confused. Why would that reviewer read and review a memoir if he has a problem with memoirs?! Moreover, if he's got a problem with people writing about their lives, then he better throw out about 80% of the world's literature. Further, what does "Dave Eggers on Mountain Dew" mean? That would imply that Fusselman's book is hypercaffeinated, when it's just the opposite. My guess is that the reviewer didn't read Fusselman's book, or Eggers's, or Wallace's, for that matter, and he's upset that McSweeney's didn't take HIS book to publish. Anyhoo, The Pharmacist's Mate is brilliant, understated, profound, perfectly written and deeply moving. It takes courage and a huge heart to write candidly about actual life, and this is what Fusselman has done. Long live the Literature of the Truth.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Miss Fusselman's Book, June 9, 2001

By 

Patrick Roetzel (NYC, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pharmacist's Mate (Hardcover)

It is very difficult to talk about tiny things and at the same time talk about immense things, but this writer seems to do it naturally, and the result is a beautiful, interwoven story, filled with sweet, serious, funny observations about her immediate situation, her place in larger situations, and the places of others in both her life and their own. With an amazingly light touch, things that seem to be very different and simple are shown to be connected and extraordinary. I loved this book.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Pharmacist's Mate, July 27, 2001

By 

Bryan Charles (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pharmacist's Mate (Hardcover)

In his essay "On Writing," Raymond Carver gave a great bit of advice: No tricks. In true Carver fashion, he'd pared this down from Geoffrey Wolff's edict, No cheap tricks. Carver's skeletal prose is largely out of fashion now, which is sort of a shame, because Amy Fuesselman's The Pharmacist's Mate proves that honest, bare bones writing is still capable of tremendous power.

The Pharmacist's Mate is a brief, though not slight, meditation on death, birth, family and music. I found the parts about music particularly interesting, with Fusselman veering as she does between the visceral powers of sea shanties, AC/DC's "Hell's Bells," and "Row Row Row Your Boat." In Fusselman's world, music is one of our most mysterious properties. It takes up space, fills whole stadiums, whips up emotion and inspires devotion, yet it remains invisible, something that can't be touched.

Of course, death is just as intangible. But rather than fill space, it sucks people into it. "After (my dad) died," Fusselman writes, "I saw that people and space are permeable to each other in a way that people and people are not. I saw that space is like water. People can go inside it." And we are there with her, with her family, around her father's deathbed when he finally slips into the space between them.

But this book isn't merely about his dying. He is alive in these pages, too, in the form of journal entries from his days in the Merchant Marine. These are the most priceless sections of the book. They speak in the voice of a young man learning about the world (literally). He shoots sea gulls with a pea shooter, practices using a sextant and treats his shipmates for shock and VD. My favorite line (written after some of the crew on his ship leaves): "I sure hated to see Freddy Hoeske go, for he was my best buddy."

The Pharmacist's Mate defies easy categorization, but I guess you could call it a memoir. It succeeds, though, where other contemporary memoirs fail (or worse, become a big boring mess of solipsism and self-pity) because it reflects something larger than the interests of the author. (For a touchstone example of this, see Martin Amis's Experience, which is very, very great.) It does this, in part, because the writing is lean and disciplined. That's the quality that I admire most.