A year-long journey by renowned psychiatrist Irvin Yalom and his wife, esteemed feminist writer Marilyn Yalom, after her terminal diagnosis — as they reflect on how to love and live without regret.
Summary
In April 2019, Marilyn Yalom was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Within days, she and her husband of sixty-five years began to write — separately, in alternating chapters — about what was happening to them. A Matter of Death and Life is the book that resulted: a dual memoir written in real time, without the consolation of knowing how it ends.
Irvin Yalom had spent a career helping patients confront death anxiety, and had written Staring at the Sun about facing mortality without illusion. Now the theory met the fact. He writes as a husband losing his wife and as a therapist watching his own defenses fail; Marilyn writes as a scholar of French literature and women’s history who is choosing, deliberately, how to leave. Her chapters end when she does — in November 2019, with medical aid in dying, at home, surrounded by her family. His continue alone through the first year of grief.
What lifts the book above other illness memoirs is its double vantage. Two writers, two temperaments, one event: her clear-eyed practicality against his reluctance to let go, her cultural fluency against his clinical honesty. The result is neither a manual for dying nor a study of grief, but something rarer — a record of a long marriage examined at the moment it ends, by both of the people inside it.
Why read it
For readers who came to Yalom through the case stories, this is the book in which he becomes the patient. It belongs beside Staring at the Sun and Creatures of a Day — the three works in which death, the first of his four ultimate concerns, is faced most directly. Readers who have lost a partner, or expect to, report reading it slowly and returning to it.
Related reading: the best books about death and dying, the best books on grief and loss, and Irvin Yalom’s books in order.
Endorsements
Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
“An unforgettable and achingly beautiful story of enduring love. I will be thinking about this for years to come.”
Publishers Weekly
“A poignant, deeply intimate account of a marriage’s final chapter.”