She Came to Live Out Loud: An Inspiring Family Journey Through Illness, Loss, and Grief

MacPherson (The Power Lovers) brings more literary sophistication to her account of witnessing a dignified dying than Mitch Albom brought to his bestselling Tuesdays with Morrie. As a result, her book is less sentimental. It is also as concerned with the larger issues of how society treats disease and dying as it is with portraying the vitality of its subject, Anna Johannessen, a 40-year-old wife and mother of two preteen children, who battled breast cancer and lost. MacPherson writes that, after the death of her own mother, she became acutely aware of ""an American paradox of insane proportions. We encounter loss and sorrow daily. And yet we collude in a pathological dance of denial that merely heightens the pain of grieving."" Following Anna through the ups and downs of cancer treatment, MacPherson records, in great detail, conversations between Anna and her doctors, relatives, friends and counselors. She also interviews Anna directly, revealing her thoughts, feelings and worries at various stages of her disease. Deliberately forsaking journalistic objectivity, MacPherson occasionally gushes in her praise of Anna and her family, but she succeeds in bringing readers into the dying woman's intimate world and in conveying everyone's grief, which ""begins at the moment of diagnosis."" The book dwells on Anna's every experience with medical treatments, hospice care and relationships. If she sometimes gets bogged down in details, MacPherson deserves credit for going beyond mere uplift into the nitty gritty dailiness of living and dying with an awful disease. (Feb.)