Yesterday, on Mom’s orders, I’d written his name and our number in permanent marker onto the tags of all his clothes.Īpparently what he’s done, in protest, is pitched the numbered clothing into trees. I put the phone down to verify that Dad was home and had pants on. The stranger called and said, I have some pants? Belonging to a Howard Young?

Tonight a man found Dad’s pants in a tree lit with Christmas lights.

Told in captivating glimpses and drawn from a deep well of insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Goodbye, Vitamin pilots through the loss, love, and absurdity of finding one’s footing in this life. But as Ruth's father’s condition intensifies, the comedy in her situation takes hold, gently transforming her all her grief. Ruth’s mother, meanwhile, is lucidly erratic. Her father, a prominent history professor, is losing his memory and is only erratically lucid. Her life at a crossroads, a young woman goes home again in this funny and inescapably moving debut from a wonderfully original new literary voice.įreshly disengaged from her fiancé and feeling that life has not turned out quite the way she planned, thirty-year-old Ruth quits her job, leaves town and arrives at her parents’ home to find that situation more complicated than she'd realized. Kudos for this delectable take on familial devotion and dementia.'- NPR 'One of those rare books that is both devastating and light-hearted, heartful and joyful. told in prose that is so startling in its spare beauty that I found myself thinking about Khong's turns of phrase for days after I finished reading.'- Doree Shafrir, The New York Times Book Review Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction Winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Huffington Post, Nylon, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, Booklist, and The Independent

Goodbye vitamin novel