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 IndependentWinner of the California Book Award for First FictionLos Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction“A quietly brilliant disquisition . . . told in prose that is so startling in its spare beauty that I … Fiction
“A quietly brilliant disquisition . . . 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
“One of those rare books that is both devastating and light-hearted, heartful and joyful. . . . Don’t miss it.”—Buzzfeed
“Hello, Rachel Khong. Kudos for this delectable take on familial devotion and dementia.”—NPR
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.
Freshly 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. Her father, a prominent history professor, is losing his memory and is only erratically lucid. Ruth’s mother, meanwhile, is lucidly erratic. But as Ruth’s father’s condition intensifies, the comedy in her situation takes hold, gently transforming her all her grief.
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.
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The novel Goodbye, Vitamin builds with humor, with gusto and with such deceptive lightness that the reader wonders, at its devastating end, how in the world the debut author Rachel Khong managed to pull it off so beautifully. The only possible answer is this, that Khong is a magician, and that we are lucky to fall under her spell at the beginning of her brilliant writing life.
Half stand-up comic, half a seismographer of the human heart, Khong writes with vulnerability and penetrating insight, and with a gentle humor that moves you not only to care for her characters, but also to care more fervently for the people in your life.
Hard-ball, laconic, severely, even frighteningly, intimate. To boot, a current of food runs through it, a sophisticated but not snobbish celebration of the empiric integrity of all food. The color of Fanta! You will emerge wanting to take a good snifferoo of a fresh hot cut radish, to study the underside of a saltine, and in the face of depression to be a better and perkier person than you are. This book does it all.
Equal parts clever and tender, Khong’s [Goodbye,] Vitamin is a moving meditation on what it means to patient, forgiving, and human.
I don’t know how she did it, but Rachel Khong has breathed fresh life into the slacker comedy, the family drama, and the campus novel ― in wry, swift, spiky, heartfelt prose that is a joy to read. I have enormous admiration for Goodbye, Vitamin, but more than that, I enjoyed the hell out of reading it.
Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin is one of the funniest elegiac novels I have ever read, and also one of the gutsiest. It is about so many things ― Alzheimer’s, fast food, turning thirty, marriage, Southern California, the digestive habits of jelly fish, the invention of the intermittent windshield wiper ― and at the same time it is about only one thing, the really important thing, the imperative, as E. M. Forster long ago urged, to connect. Rarely has gravitas been handled with such lightness of touch, or a sad story told so happily.
A touching story of an adult daughter returning home to help with her cognitively declining father — not the kind of subject matter to normally result in a funny, heartwarming, and quirky novel, and yet here it does!
Quick read – I couldn’t put it down! Heartwarming and a story line most can relate to, I’d recommend this book to anyone!
I loved this book. I have had experience with Alzheimers with members of my family. This showed such sweetness between the daughter caring for her father as he declined. It was funny, sad and full of love. I highly recommend it.
I loved this book from the first few paragraphs. Ruth, spending a Christmas at home with her family for the first time in years, gets caught up in the changes happening to her father, Howard, a college professor, as he and the family grapples with his recent Alzheimer’s diagnosis. After witnessing some of the situations her mother has been dealing with alone, Ruth decides to take a year away from her job to stay at home and help out.
The story is captured in dated journal entries, so you follow the changes with her father as the disease progresses and the emotional changes of all the characters in confronting these changes plus their own emotional baggage, both Ruth and her mother Annie, as well as brother Linus and some of Howard’s students. It’s also an interesting juxtaposition of Ruth’s journal against the journal pages her father kept of her questions as a small child.
The story is handled thoughtfully and its humor and its candor about all the main characters just grabs the reader, making it an easy, yet poignant reading experience. I agreed with the quote on the book cover by author Alexandra Kleeman, that Rachel Khong “moves you to not only care for her characters but also to care more fervently for the people in your life.”
I received this book from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program for my honest review.