Our Long Marvelous Dying

“DeForest draws from [their] own experience as a palliative care doctor to write with acute perception about the thin membrane that separates life from death. Readers of When Breath Becomes Air will want to add this to their shelf.”
 

“Gripping...There is a whiff of Edgar Allan Poe: a preoccupation with death, an unmoored narrator, a deadly pandemic spread invisibly by a breath or a cough... DeForest has created a bleak yet powerful account of the toll of dying on family members and health professionals who care for the almost-dead.”

“An existential thriller—fast-paced, tender-hearted and brutally funny, this novel will haunt you long after you finish it. I would read DeForest on my deathbed.”

“Our Long Marvelous Dying solidifies Anna DeForest’s place as a cool and stylish prose master of striking and exquisite sentences that refuse to turn away from what others deny; a meditation on love and dying, grief and living, and the beautiful, shattering ways they are all entwined. I raced through this book with a heart-stricken propulsion, spellbound to the gutting last line. DeForest is a remarkable talent.”

“A voice as intimate, as clarion, and as unbeholden as Anna DeForest’s—large-souled, sorrow-seasoned, scathingly truthful—comes along only every few generations. In the tensed, starkly precise sentences of Our Long Marvelous Dying, DeForest levels with us about loss and its aftershocks—the lifelong clouts of a bullying parent’s withheld love, the first meekest rumblings of alienation in a marriage, the hospitalized body’s relentless determination to be done with itself. Here is another triumph from a writer of seemingly limitless empathy, brilliance, and fortitude.”

“Our Long Marvelous Dying is the type of book we need much more of right now. A book that truly looks at the present moment in a way that makes us better prepared to face it. This sophomore effort confirms my sense of Anna DeForest as one of America’s best new writers.”

“Anna DeForest’s Our Long Marvelous Dying gives us a novelist fully in command of their instrument, staring searchingly at death without the dubious veils of euphemism or willed obliviousness. We see dying in the macro—a young doctor navigating a global death event exacerbated by myriad social and political pathologies—set against more quotidian deaths: passion crumbling within a relationship, personal agency eroding as a child is unexpectedly taken in. But what elevates Our Long Marvelous Dying into the realm of the rapturously readable is DeForest’s uncanny gift for lyric language. One can almost pick out voices—Patacara, Lorca, Durkheim, Kahlo—with whom Our Long Marvelous Dying speaks. A true artist brings an impossible thing into utter clarity; with this novel, DeForest enters with singular vision into a species-old conversation about what happens—to the dead and to the living—when we die.”

“DeForest, a palliative care physician, has delivered...a meditation on both life and death leavened by occasional sardonic humor. Short, dark, stylish, sui generis.”

"In Our Long Marvelous Dying, DeForest challenges our discomfort with death and instead leads with loss and our search for meaning within it."