Edi is dying of ovarian cancer and she’s craving the lemon cake she once got from Dean & Deluca deli in New York in the mid-1990s. Her forever best friend Ash is keeping vigil by Eli’s bedside in the Graceful Shepherd Hospice in western Massachusetts, trying to track down that elusive cake and keep Edi happy and comfortable with juice, lip balm and company. She’s also ‘whoring around’ (Ash’s words) with a variety of inappropriate people: the palliative care doctor, a substitute teacher from her daughters’ old school, and Edi’s brother. Then there’s her own not-quite-ex-husband, Honey…
That’s the set up for the US memoirist and journalist Catherine Newman’s first adult novel. It’s semi-autobiographical (the dying part, not the whoring: Newman’s own best friend died of ovarian cancer) and wildly readable: a Pringles tube of a book. That’s not an accidental analogy: there’s so much food, you might need a Gaviscon on hand.
Edi and Ash have the wisecracking conversational rhythm of a long-established double act, creating a chatty bubble of love, reminiscences and jokes in Edi’s room.
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