Home is burning

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Home is burning

Title:

Home is burning

Author:

Marshall, Dan (Daniel Joseph), 1982-

ISBN:

9781250068828

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

xi, 304 pages ; 25 cm

Personal Subject:

Marshall, Dan (Daniel Joseph), 1982-

Subject Term:

Cancer -- Patients -- Family relationships.

Cancer -- Patients -- United States -- Biography.

Mothers and daughters -- United States.

Mothers and sons -- United States.

Fathers and daughters -- United States.

Fathers and sons -- United States.

Summary:

"Dan's mom has always had cancer. First diagnosed when he was only ten years old, she was the model of resilience throughout his childhood, fighting her disease with tenacity and a mouth foul enough to make a sailor blush. But just as she faces a relapse, her husband -a successful businessman and devoted father-is diagnosed with ALS. He is told that in a few months' time, he will be unable to walk, eat, or breathe on his own. Dan, a recent college graduate living the good life in Los Angeles, has no choice but to return home to help. Reinstalled in his parents' basement (in one of the only non-Mormon homes in a Salt Lake City subdivision) Dan is reunited with his siblings. His older sister Tiffany is resentful, having stayed closer to home to bear the brunt of their mother's illness. Younger brother Greg comes to lend a hand, giving up a journalism career and evenings cruising Chicago gay bars. Younger sister Michelle is a sullen teenager experimenting with drinking and flirting with her 35-year-old soccer coach. And baby sister Chelsea-the oddest duck in a family of misfits-can only think about dance. Together they form Team Terminal, going to battle against their parents' illnesses and cracking plenty of jokes along the way. As Dan steps into his role as caregiver, wheelchair wrangler, and sibling referee, he watches pieces of his previous life slip away, and comes to realize that you don't get to choose when it's time to grow up"--

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi)	362.19699 MAR	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year, 2015

For the Marshalls, laughter is the best medicine. Especially when combined with alcohol, pain pills, excessive cursing, sexual escapades, actual medicine, and more alcohol.

Meet Dan Marshall. 25, good job, great girlfriend, and living the dream life in sunny Los Angeles without a care in the world. Until his mother calls. And he ignores it, as you usually do when Mom calls. Then she calls again. And again.

Dan thought things were going great at home. But it turns out his mom's cancer, which she had battled throughout his childhood with tenacity and a mouth foul enough to make a sailor blush, is back. And to add insult to injury, his loving father has been diagnosed with ALS.

Sayonara L.A., Dan is headed home to Salt Lake City, Utah.

Never has there been a more reluctant family reunion: His older sister is resentful, having stayed closer to home to bear the brunt of their mother's illness. His younger brother comes to lend a hand, giving up a journalism career and evenings cruising Chicago gay bars. His next younger sister, a sullen teenager, is a rebel with a cause. And his baby sister - through it all - can only think about her beloved dance troop. Dan returns to shouting matches at the dinner table, old flames knockingat the door, and a speech device programmed to help his father communicate that is as crude as the rest of them. But they put their petty differences aside and form Team Terminal, battling their parents' illnesses as best they can, when not otherwise distracted by the chaos that follows them wherever they go. Not even the family cats escape unscathed.

As Dan steps into his role as caregiver, wheelchair wrangler, and sibling referee, he watches pieces of his previous life slip away, and comes to realize that the further you stretch the ties that bind, the tighter they hold you together.

Author Notes

DAN MARSHALL grew up in a nice home with nice parents in Salt Lake City, Utah, before attending UC Berkeley. After college, Dan worked at a strategic communications public relations firm in Los Angeles. At 25, he left work and returned to Salt Lake to take care of his sick parents. While caring for them, he started writing detailed accounts about many of their weird, sad, funny adventures. H ome Is Burning is his first book.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this impressive debut, Marshall relates the bleak reality of caring for his father after ALS-also known as Lou Gehrig's disease-began wreaking havoc on his body. The disease had a dramatic effect on the entire family, already reeling from their mother's ongoing battle with cancer. Memoirs about a family member who has contracted a terminal illness are almost tediously common, but most of them don't include jokes about oral sex or puns on the word "dystrophy." Fortunately for readers, Marshall's brain is wired for profanity, gallows humor, and graphic self-deprecation, and the rest of his family is not much different. Marshall evokes sympathy, but never pity, as he conveys his family's pain through fart jokes, farcical misadventures (sexual and medical), and-in the middle of all the confusion-emotion so raw and potent it's almost jarring. Honesty is the key; Marshall never shies away from the filthy, uncomfortable reality, and it's that brutal truth-telling that makes his memoir a must-read. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

In his first book, a 20-something recounts his battles with caring for a mother fighting cancer and a father with Lou Gehrig's disease. As a young professional newly graduated from college, Utah native Marshall was on top of the world. Not only did he and his siblings come from wealth and live with "the proverbial silver spoon jammed firmly up our asses"; he also had a job and girlfriend he loved in Los Angeles, a city he enjoyed for its "traffic and pollution and assholes speeding around in BMWs." The one shadow on his good fortune was having a mother sick with cancer. But even that difficulty was one Marshall and his family had overcome thanks to his father, a man who had held chaos at bay with his unflagging devotion to them all. Then one day, Marshall learned that his father had been diagnosed with ALS, a disease that was "a real ugly motherfucker andpretty much a death sentence." At first, the family tried to carry on their lives as though nothing had changed. However, less than a year after the diagnosis, Marshall's siblings told him that he needed to come home to help care for both parents. It was then he realized that "life [wasn't] all about gin and tonics and sunsets." For the next year, Marshall watched as his once healthy and active father declined into near total helplessness and his traumatized mother reeled from chemotherapy and drugs that addled her brain. Relationships between him, his siblings, and his friends strained to the breaking point. Marshall then had to face his own personal losses, which included the end of a long-term relationship he believed would culminate in marriage. Though the author's potty-mouthed profanity can be trying, the book is funny, heartbreaking, and unapologetically crude. Strangely enough, as Marshall is forced into awareness of life's harsher realities and grows up, his linguistic coarseness gives way to a narrative that manages to be quite touching. A poignantly provocative memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Recent grad Marshall leaves it all behind job, girlfriend, dream life in L.A. to return home to Utah to care for his parents. His mother has had cancer for 15 years, and it's back with a vengeance. Worse in some ways, his marathon-running, take-charge dad is rapidly disappearing into Lou Gehrig's disease. Despite the book's continual bad language and many morbid jokes, it's a weeper nearly from page 1. How could anyone handle the thought of losing both parents almost at once, especially when there are two teen sisters at home also needing help? Marshall and his other siblings shoulder it all by swearing, drinking, racing wheelchairs down the halls of hospitals, and caring for their loved ones while their world somewhat literally falls down around them. This memoir offers a been-there, done-that to those who have perhaps only partially been there, and lessons on the necessity and difficulty of letting go can be found among the miasma of Marshall's trying to do it all. He doesn't fail, but he's only human. That's what counts most in this raucous, rowdy, heartbreaking story.--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2015 Booklist

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Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

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