In Sickness and In Health: A Love Story [Hardcover]

Karen Propp (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 3, 2002

What happens when your spouse is no longer the same person you first married? How does marriage change us, and how do we change our marriage?Sometimes marriage seems a shaky proposition at best, and never more so than when the honeymoon fades to reality. For Karen Propp, reality meant knowingly marrying a man who had already undergone a course of radiation for prostate cancer and who, mere weeks before the birth of their son, faces surgery that will compromise his life and their marriage on every level. In this humorous, poignant, well-crafted narrative, we see Karen torn between a growing son and ailing husband. We witness the ups and downs, the love and the loss between a man and a woman as they struggle against but emerge victorious over a very intimate disease.In Sickness and in Health is an honest exploration of the loss and disappointment associated with married life, as well as a love story that shows how a woman is irrevocably changed by the love she shares with her husband, and the depths that love is plumbed by the specter of illness.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In The Pregnancy Project, Propp chronicled her experiences with infertility treatments. Now, she offers a look at the equally intimate ordeal of husband Sam's prostate cancer. In clear, short sentences, Propp creates a cancer memoir not from the patient's viewpoint, but her own. Karen was nearing 40 when she married and struggled to have a child, yet says she and Sam are both "young to be going through this." Unlike the older women in her support group, Karen represents baby-boomers who were told they could have it all, who remained single long enough to get used to being the center of their own lives, and who did not expect to caretake their sick husbands. She deftly describes her world of Jewish, intellectual types in the Boston area, the single life she only gradually leaves behind and her constantly changing marital relationship. Karen's poetic command of language and her mature confrontation of the realities of life, love and long-term marriage make this memoir unusually forceful. The pall of Sam's first wife's death from cancer, the difficult conception of Karen's and Sam's child, and Sam's seven years of radiation therapy hang over them like an ever-present dark cloud. While cancer memoirs often end with either the patient's death or joyous restoration to pre-cancer existence, here life is saved, but many failed attempts to regain potency (Viagra, a clumsy pump contraption, injections) are described in painful detail. Yet Karen Propp delivers a triumphant story, honestly depicting her adaptation to change and to the discovery of love and resilience's unexpected depths.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From the Back Cover

"In Sickness and in Health is such a powerful and moving book. With love, humor, and grace, Karen Propp writes fearlessly about her husband's illness and her family's ordeal, and she makes the reader care very much about how it all turns out. A great love story . . . " --Luanne Rice, author of Cloud Nine and Safe Harbor

"I read this book with interest, and admired it for its honesty and its precision. It is about prostate cancer and its effects on both the patient and those who love him, yes; but more important, it is a lesson in resilience. It shows how you can find again a love that seems lost. It also proves that you can move from anger, despair, and hopelessness into a new and richer appreciation for yourself, your family and friends, and the always-unreliable (but also beautiful) world at large." --Elizabeth Berg, author of Talk before Sleep and Open House

"Karen Propp has written a moving, elegant page-turner. Her story is one of faith and resilience; her character is compelling for how she both resists and accepts the traditional roles of wife and mother. What she has to say about the flawed and contradictory selves we find in marriage, and how that plays out in sex and satisfaction (or lack thereof), rings true for so many couples, whatever their sickness or health." --Lauren Slater, author of Lying and Prozac Diary

"A fascinating look into a marriage without sex. Karen Propp shows us bedroom antics that are ridiculous, sublime, tedious, fiery, heartbreaking--in short, what we know love to be." --Pagan Kennedy, author of Black Livingstone and The Exes

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Rodale Books (August 3, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579545521
• ISBN-13: 978-1579545529
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,661,815 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply wonderful, November 22, 2002

By 

Jerome Schwartz (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Sickness and In Health: A Love Story (Hardcover)

This book is simply wonderful--moving, funny, uncompromisingly intimate and honest. The author has revealed her inner self to the reader--with all the ups and downs of real life. As characters in the book, the husband and wife pass through stages in which they evolve and reach a higher level of perception of the other. It reads like a novel, only better, because there are no pat answers and formulaic denouements in what is simply a story about the demands the realities of life make on two intelligent, sensitive and mature adults. This book is meaningful not only for prostate cancer survivors but for so many of us who are going through the changes aging makes in us and in the ways we relate to one another.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Loving and honest - a remarkable book, August 7, 2002

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In Sickness and In Health: A Love Story (Hardcover)

With both lyricism and candor, Karen Propp has written a remarkable book about love shadowed by danger - in this case her husband's battle with prostate cancer. When Karen and Sam first meet, they are old enough and sensible enough not to have many illusions, but neither is prepared for his diagnosis. The treatments leave both devastated, but despite the grim facts of living with recurrent cancer, their love for each other keeps them together. This book is indeed, as the subtitle proclaims, a love story. It is also a story of survival, not, as one might expect, for Sam, but for Propp.

The obvious recommendation would be for women whose husbands suffer from prostate cancer because Propp supplies details on the controversy of various treatments, of impotency, of therapy and support groups, of learning to live with a spouse forever changed, of raising a child in a house of illness. However, Propp's examination of the interior of her marriage makes for compelling reading for a general readership.

In Sickness & In Health should be required reading for all couples grappling with illness in the family. Even those untouched as yet by such a crisis will find the poignant examination of love and the stubborn will to survive a reason to read this book.

5.0 out of 5 stars I couldn't put this book down, September 7, 2002

By 

Jack Conrad Gray Jr. (mommy-daddy-land) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Sickness and In Health: A Love Story (Hardcover)

I have been somewhat deprived of reading time for the last five years--I have a young child, mortgage, aging parents, demanding career, expensive tastes and so forth. But after reading the first few pages--the first scene, I became dazzled with the way it was written and did not stop until I finished.

Though it deals with illness and serious loss, it reads as an adventure novel and entrances you with its dynamic cinematic style. Extreme dificulties provide the matrix for the story--but that matrix rests on a soft cushion of human warmth and life's conditions--things we can all relate to.

The personal honesty of the presentation lets you see yourself within such circumstances. It leaves a glimmer of hope that should such tragedy befall you, through reading this book, you might have learned to have the grace, sparkling insight and clarity of thought to experience your own life as richly as this story is told.