A Matter of Death and Life

A Matter of Life and Death is a deeply personal double memoir, written in alternating chapters by a long-married couple in their late 80s. Irvin Yalom is a psychiatrist and well-respected novelist; Marilyn Yalom, diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2019, was a professor of literature and women's studies. Emotionally intelligent and unusually articulate, the couple was married for 65 years. Though plodding at times, they document in detail the last year of Marilyn's life, from diagnosis to experimental treatment to hospice to physician-assisted death. It is written as a testament as well as a guide.

Yalom will turn 90 in June of 2021. In 2019, at the age of 88, he discovered his beloved wife of 65 years, Marilyn Yalom, a celebrated historian and feminist author and professor, was dying of cancer. She insisted, perhaps out of concern for Irv, that they write one final book together, each contributing alternating chapters. The result is a book of searing honesty, an honest account of profound love as well as a profound and painful loss. Irv isn't perfect – he's human, and he's getting old himself, dealing with memory loss and neurological problems. He doesn't dress anything… show more.