Goodbye, Vitamin

I savored every sentence of this book about Ruth, a thirty-something who moves back home to help care for her father with Alzheimer’s. Reading it made me feel like I was in the company of someone delightful: there’s humor and unexpected quirkiness on every page.

The book includes snippets of Ruth’s dad’s diary chronicling moments in her childhood, which are both winning and poignant. Khong is great at choosing moments and helping me see the hilarious or odd in the everyday. 

The story of thirty-year-old, recently unengaged Ruth Young, who moves back in with her parents for a transitional year to help care for her father, Howard Young, a history professor recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Khong’s novel, written as a diary, contains astute vignettes on a daughter's understanding, misunderstanding, and re-learning to love her father. The novel addresses the heavy topic of caring for one’s aging parent, who is in the throes of dementia. And while the Fosters will, at times, make you weep, they remarkably are also able to elicit a chuckle in the next breath. 

After a broken engagement, Ruth arrives home to stay with her mother and her father, who has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Spare, poignant, and honest, this novel chronicles a daughter’s attempts to navigate a new normal with her “erratically lucid” and “lucidly erratic” parents. While the topic is innately heavy, somehow Khong manages to make the book light and as much about the narrator’s own flaws and struggles as about the illness at hand. It’s refreshing and touching and all the things—and also written in an unusual structure with mini vignettes throughout.