The Stuff of Life: A Daughter's Memoir [Hardcover]

Karen Karbo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2003

As a generation of baby boomers faces the aging of their parents, Karen Karbo's resonant new memoir tells the intimate story of one stoic father and wiseacre grown-up daughter navigating the last months of his life.

When Karen Karbo's father, a charming, taciturn Clint Eastwood type who lives in a triple-wide in the Nevada desert, is diagnosed with lung cancer, his only daughter rises to the challenge of caring for him. Neither of them is exactly cut out for the job. Karen is a Doc Marten-sporting freelance writer who lives in Portland, Oregon, the primary breadwinner for a slightly chaotic blended family of five, who has always steered clear of the "helping professions." Dick Karbo, a retired industrial designer and card-carrying member of the NRA, is an equally reluctant patient. As Dick's disease progresses, Karen finds herself sometimes the responsible adult, sometimes a stubborn teenager all over again, by turns grief-stricken, rebellious, and amused by the grim ironies of the situation. In the end what father and daughter discover more than anything is the love and the toughness that makes them alike.

Sensitive and ruefully funny, The Stuff of Life invites you into a family as complicated and real as your own, capturing a moment filled with all the sadness and warmth of adult life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Karbo achieves the near-impossible with this memoir: she wrangles the potentially depressing subjects of death and a dysfunctional family into a funny, uplifting page-turner. When her kindhearted but curmudgeonly father is diagnosed with lung cancer, Karbo begins the exhausting leapfrog between her husband and three children in Portland, Ore. and his triple-wide in the Nevada desert. Her attempts to discuss the rapidly spreading disease with the world's most uncommunicative patient are indeed valiant, but Karbo's honesty about her partial regression into adolescence is what will distinguish her story from the rest of the cancer caretaker genre. After all, what normal human beings in Karbo's position haven't found themselves "running on the fumes of maturity... still and always the long-suffering sixteen-year-old?" It's refreshing that our tour guide in this country of illness doesn't pretend to be a natural-born Florence Nightingale. Instead, she freely admits, "I have little patience with the necessary routines of caregiving. I trust doctors about as much as I trust mechanics or the retail associate at Nordstrom who tells me I look fabulous in a pair of $1,200 Calvin Klein capri pants, and am a barf-o-phone to boot." Karbo may occasionally hide out in the bathroom-reduced to reading the fake newsprint wallpaper during her father's hour-long coughing jags-but, as the end approaches, no one can argue she isn't a devoted, well-intentioned daughter. She may apologize for being a "blinking, flinching, grief-stricken fool," but this sense of fallibility and honesty could inspire an alternate subtitle for her book: a survival manual for the living.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

As in her popular Generation Ex: Tales from the Second Wives Club (2000), Karbo's latest finds wisdom and wild humor in "heart-crackingly sad" family stories. When Karbo's father is diagnosed with lung cancer, Karbo becomes his primary caretaker, shuttling between her family in Portland, Oregon, and his triple-wide trailer in the Nevada desert. A stoic, Clint Eastwood type, Karbo's father is a horrible patient, and Karbo, whose mother died of cancer when she was a teenager, doubts her own nursing instincts: "We're not a well-matched patient-nurse couple." In a narrative that loops back through family history, Karbo talks about her complicated relationship with both parents, her struggle to balance motherhood and her writing career, and what she learns about her dad as he moves closer to death. With generous honesty, Karbo describes nuanced moments of nearly excruciating tenderness, embarrassment, frustration, and love, balanced with passages of often side-splitting humor. A compulsively readable memoir about family and the writing life that will appeal to Anne Lamott fans. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; Second Printing edition (October 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582341834
• ISBN-13: 978-1582341835
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,827,497 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #60 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Aging > Cancer > Lung Cancer

More About the Author

Karen Karbo is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books; four nonfiction books-including How to Hepburn, which the Philadelphia Inquirer called 'an exuberant celebration of a great original,' and The Stuff of Life, a People Magazine's Critic's Choice-and three books for young adults. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Outside, Elle, Vogue, More, and salon.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Inside Scoop of Living while your parent is dying., January 24, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Stuff of Life: A Daughter's Memoir (Hardcover)

Karen did a beautiful job of making me laugh while I cringed. I got this book because I am currently in her shoes with my own dad--our shoes are different sizes but the path is the same. I was helped knowing her experience, knowing her thoughts, feelings, reactions and how she coped with not knowing. Her humor touched me deeply and I felt so grateful that there is also room to laugh during this challenge of life and death. I highly recommend this book to any adult child who chooses to courageously face and honor their parent during their final chapter. I have felt so alone at times but have also felt helped by Karbo's generous contribution for those of us who follow in her footsteps. She has helped me not to judge myself and to open more softly to accepting the reality that one of my loved ones is in the midst of his final times here and compassion for self and others truly connects and brings a crazy kind of peace. Thank you Karen.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars tragic hilarity, October 3, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Stuff of Life: A Daughter's Memoir (Hardcover)

Here's what is so terrific about this book: 1) It satisfies your morbid curiosity about how death really happens, eg "I didn't know how long a body could hang on, how dying can be imminent for days and days and days," a truth nobody ever tells you; 2) it satisfies your morbid curiosity about how other respectable competent people actually get through the deaths of their loved ones and how they fall apart a bit (eg don't actually want to hear details about their bowel movements). 3) It's tragic AND funny, often at the same time, as when Karbo describes her cancer-and-chemo ravaged father coughing into a square of kleenex and folding it into ever tinier and tinier squares and then dropping it into a plastic bag, or rewards himself by having a SINGLE JELLY BEAN FOR DESSERT, or counts the number of kibbles he gives his dog, 23 every day. We get this great clear sense of him as a bit exasperating in his obsessive-compulsivity but also as a meticulous and a profoundly decent and moral human being, a duality which helps those of us with gigantically ambivalent feelings about our own parents. Along the way Karbo tells similarly horrible/funny stories about the lives and deaths of other luminaries in her life like her mother (brain cancer), stepsister (suicide), dog (euthanasia). 4) There is genuine suspense about what happens next: even though we ultimately know "how it ends," we don't know HOW it ends, and in fact there is a mystery about Karbo's actual parentage which gets revealed at the end. 5) The best part, though, is that you end up gobbling the book just waiting to see how Karbo is going to say stuff. For example that her father's nurse's real name, Sandra Nightingale, is so unlikely that it "must be her nom de nurse." Or that her grim and determined mother, just before dying when Karbo was a bewildered 16, strategized with Karbo about her college wardrobe, "not unlike a general discussing battle plans with his immediate subordinate." Or that on his deathbed her father "stares up at the ceiling. He looks hypnotized, but at the same time preoccupied, as if he's doing a difficult math problem in his head." This writing captures important stuff, in fact the stuff of life and death. This is good writing and this is a good, even a great, book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny and uplifting, October 16, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Stuff of Life: A Daughter's Memoir (Hardcover)

When my sister passed this book on to me I thought I'd never read it. Like I want to read about someone's father dying of lung cancer? It turns out I read The Stuff of Life in about two sittings. This compulsively readable memoir is funny and wise and has a lot to say about how important it is to just be yourself, and do what you can for the people you love. It debunks the myth that in order to be a caregiver you have to have a Florence Nightengale-type personality. It's NOT about death, but about how we live. It's about the mess of life. I thought it was way better than Tuesdays with Morrie, because it was more real.