Review: The Household Guide to Dying, by Debra Adelaide

Before I start this review, I have to tell you that I'm writing it with a face still damp from crying through the last quarter of it. I can't remember the last time I was so connected to a novel. I have read many, many excellent books, but this got very, very much under my skin.

In The Household Guide to Dying, Adelaide explores death on many levels, the first and most obvious of which being that of the main character, Delia, who is a thirty-something mother of two girls with terminal cancer. An author of many previous household guides, Delia is not one to take anything lying down, last of all her own death. As a way of coping, and controlling the situation, she begins writing her last book, an honest how-to manual on how to die in an orderly, dignified manner. What at first seems a strange choice becomes the venue for Delia to work through her own tragic relationship with death, which the reader finds out was established long before Delia's cancer did.

After the first few chapters, the novel splits into two interwoven parts, that of Delia's current situation, and the one from her past that she drives off to face alone one morning after getting her children off to school. We soon learn of Delia's other life, where she was a pregnant teenaged runaway who, in an attempt to find the father of her baby, ended up settling in a small town populated by circus performers, where her lover's family lived. While she didn't find the father of her child, she settled there and made a home for herself and her son, and met Archie, who we know ends up being her husband. The mystery of the book lies in the fact that this boy, Sonny, is not in the present-tense.

As Adelaide brings the reader closer and closer to finding the answer to what happened to Sonny, we also are rapidly approaching the end of Delia's life. She stops writing incessant lists on everything from how to organize her funeral to what arrangements should be made for her eight year-old daughter's wedding, and becomes immersed in the present, her beloved chickens (who are named after the Bennet sisters from Pride and Prejudice), and the preparation of a final, loving prank on her curmudgeonly neighbor. The slower Delia becomes, the more intensely she experiences the world around her, and the more we as readers are allowed to experience her.

When the reader relives Sonny's fate with Delia, it is not so much the actual event that draws one in; Delia herself is too stunned, too numb to allow herself or us to comprehend the minute details. It is the aftermath, the decisions that must be made and carried out, that are the wrenching, heartbreakingly intimate moments that settle themselves inside one's soul. These scenes are the crux of the novel, for in these few opposing chapters, Delia flips from being the immature, flighty mother of a dying child to the mature, very much in control parent who is herself the dying child of another mother. The contrast is striking, to say the least.

Despite all of the book's sorrows, Guide is not a depressing novel. Adelaide has injected her writing with enough joy and humor, and Delia with the strength, to have an extremely uplifting tone without being at the same time overly sentimental. I was in tears at Delia's ending, but because I felt as though someone I cared about was allowing me to experience her final moments, not because Adelaide was wringing them out of me with schmaltzy prose. While the novel is fully resolved, it stops, as Delia's guide does, at the final moment, and leaves the aftermath to the living.

Rating: five stars. It is reminicent what Terms of Endearment would have been had Shirly MacLaine been twenty years younger, yet more profoundly personal, because the reader is left to create the mental images and emotions herself.