esmé weijun wang!

2016 june 19 at bookcourt:  esmé weijun wang (left, the border of paradise) in conversation with porochista khakpour (right, the last illusion).

(y'all should also check out esmé's site [here].)

---

porochista khakpour:  we knew each other because of illness.  we both have pretty severe lyme disease, and we were introduced on twitter.

PK:  even now, it's funny because i've many friends who are novelists, but we don't talk about craft or the novel.  [...]  [esmé and i] kept in touch very intensely, and then esmé's book was coming out, and she suddenly was like, "oh, yeah, i have this book."  [...]  you always hope, when you're friends with someone, that they've written something you love.  [which was the case with the border of paradise.]

PK:  how did this come about?  this idea of being a gothic novel and perhaps a taiwanese gothic novel -- what do you think of that?

esmé weijun wang:  the very, very seed of this happened when a friend of mine said to me, "i think the most romantic thing that could happen is if a brother and sister could fall in love."  so that kind of stuck in my head -- that was the seed of the novel.

EWW:  the idea of this book being taiwanese is pretty up-front.  the gothic part of it is something that didn't come to mind until the book came out and people started referring to it as gothic.  i like the idea of the book being a gothic novel.  it made a lot of sense given my literary proclivities, then and now.  i was reading a lot of the southern gothic; i'm a huge fan of flannery o'connor.  just the aesthetic of gothic literature has been a taste of mine.

EWW:  now i feel like i need to actually explain myself.  so, the first part of the book that actually existed is the chapter "the arrangement" -- that chapter was my thesis in my MFA program.  that whole novel* was thrown away after reading the sound and the fury -- that novel had been about a sister who fell in love with a sister.  i suppose that idea of sibling love did stick around, so the chapter "the arrangement" -- it's hard to know how much to say about the tongyangxi, but there is a semi-incestuous relationship that was a chinese tradition.

long story short -- more impoverished families would sell off their daughters to more wealthy families, and those more wealthy families would raise the daughters then later marry them off to their own sons.  because there were always sons.

* her garbage can novel -- she wrote this novel after reading the sound and the fury but threw it away.

EWW:  that's the thing people talk a lot about regarding faulkner, too -- how much the southern gothic genre has been passed on from the trauma of the south.  when i was in grad school, i took a class on the trauma of asia.  a part of the class that really stuck with me was this intergenerational transmission of trauma, this idea of trauma being carried genetically.  i've also been thinking about the trauma of immigration -- i've been thinking about this more and more recently.  my mom's begun texting me all these images of her journal pages from when she came to america, and i would read these pages crying because there was something so sad and harrowing about this twenty-three-year-old woman writing this journal and having a baby and saying good-bye to her parents and having to raise a child.  that stuck with me a lot, thinking about my mother specifically and the trauma of traveling a great distance and building a new life.

EWW:  what's the difference in writing about mental illness in non-fiction and fiction.  in my non-fiction, i'm very out with talking about my mental illness.  the non-fiction essays -- they have a very different purpose for me.  i like doing different things with it, like with that believer piece on schizophrenia as possession.  the way i wanted to approach it in the novel was to be as granular as i could be about this experience of having these experiences that most people don't have.  what i wanted to do in fiction, that i think is much easier to do in fiction, is to show the reader what it is like to have a hallucination and describe it in a way that it isn't just "i thought i saw a deer!  oh, it wasn't there!  it must have been a hallucination."  that's something that i'd like to explore more -- i feel like there's a lot of fiction out there about other mental illnesses, but i think psychosis still remains this scary, difficult to understand thing.

re:  having a book out

EWW:  i think it just feels like a huge relief.  it's also quite a daze; i was at AWP around the time the book was coming out, and i ran into this writer, and she said to me, "the one piece of advice i want to give you is to keep a journal and write everything down because you won't remember anything."  so i've been trying to do that because i've been wanting this to happen for a long time, and i've wanted to come to new york and have a reading, and it's been really wonderful.

Q&As

EWW:  there was always that hope with that first [novel].  but i also think there was something about that first one [where] it was definitely the one where i was figuring out what the hell i was doing.  i was discovering what kind of writer i was and also just like figuring out how to make myself sit down and write everyday and how to discipline myself.

EWW:  i had a professor in college in one of my advanced fiction classes, and one of her core pieces of advice for us was to set a time when we would write everyday.  one of her assignments was actually to submit that time to her.  i never stuck to mine.

EWW:  i figured out how to discipline myself when i learned i'd have to or i'd never accomplish anything i wanted.

EWW:  i actually think this [final book] is the one true draft.  this is not directly related, but the book also has a little bit of an ambiguous ending, so people will ask what really happens.  and i think asking that kind of question for me makes the assumption that there is one true ending.

EWW:  i would show [my husband] drafts, and he'd ask, "why is the room pink?", and i'd say, "because it is," and it would bother him that i wouldn't have this intention for each of the decisions i'd made in my stories.

EWW:  i didn't really start writing non-fiction until the book was mostly done.  i'm trying to write both non-fiction and fiction now, and i actually find that, no, i'm not that concerned with non-fiction cannibalizing fiction or vice versa because the way i approach both is so different.

EWW:  i do think that the way i have an inner monologue influences my fiction and the way that i depict the inner monologues of my characters.  i am not very good at [disassociating] myself from being a person with schizoaffective disorder because i've always lived with it.  i really like it when fiction can get quite granular about how psychology works because we're these meat things going around looking at other meat things and wondering what's going on inside.

EWW:  i kind of feel that way [excited/proud] about the whole [book].  it took so long to write this thing, so i'm pretty proud of it.

esmé weijun wang & alice sola kim & wei tchou!

2016 june 16 at aaww:  what an incredible event.  i am not even going to try to preface this with a weak introduction; let's get right to it!

(ok, brief introductions, though, in case you aren't familiar with these names:  esmé weijun wang's debut novel is the border of paradise.  [my review here.]  alice sola kim is working on a novel and won a whiting award this year.  wei tchou is a contributor to the new yorker.  i love hearing asian-american writers talk as much as i love reading what asian-american writers write.)

---

re:  if their family reads their work.

• wei tchou:  i got on the phone with my dad, and he said, "look, your mom doesn't read your work."  [...]  [they don't read her work, but they're supportive.]  i'm at the point where my parents don't read my work, and i find it really freeing.
• alice sola kim:  for a long time, nobody read what i wrote.  then, there came a time when my brothers, whom i'm not close to, both said to me, "why so much swearing, alice?" in a really sweet way.  [...] and my mom said to me, "i read your story, alice, and i did not understand it, but, in some time, i will read it again.  and again.  until i understand it."  which is kind of sweetly dark.
• esmé weijun wang:  i think my family didn't know i was a writer until this book came out.
• EWW:  neither of my parents has finished reading the book [the border of paradise].  they're trying to read it, but neither of their english is very good, and they're very supportive.
• ASK:  will they be scandalized?  you know, if they get past a certain point?
• EWW:  i think my parents think i know what sex is at this point.
• ASK:  it gets freak nasty at some point.
• EWW:  actually the thing that's freak nasty in the book is something my parents actually told me is a chinese tradition.
  • [they're referring to the tongyangxi, wiki page here.]

re:  representing asian-ness or asian stories.

• EWW:  one of the first author events i did was interesting because it was one of those events where i'm sitting there and i have all these galleys in front of me, and there was this older white man who came to my table.  and he was the only one who did this of all the people that day -- he picked up my book and looked at the back and kept frowning more and more as he read it [the galley copy had more about the tongyangxi], and, then, he looked at me and said, "i don't understand how some cultures let things like this happen."  he was very scandalized by it, but then he turned it around as how some cultures don't really understand women and talked about foot binding, and i just wanted him to go away.  afterward, i started thinking about whether this was going to be part of promoting this book, but, fortunately, that story of that dude was just that one experience.
• ASK:  i did have this idea about how books about asians or by asians were marketed.  like, i had a joke about how the cover [would always have] a sad ponytail and there's this blossom falling down.
• ASK:  this is a segue into something that happened with my mom and me.  there was this ad for depression, and she clipped it out and asked, "alice, is this me?  does this look like me?"  [...]  so that was my reaction, against this perceived sad, elegant, noble way of positioning oneself.  i focus more on the grossness.  and the crassness.  i feel very bonded to this idea of yellow trash and having memories of my parents having fights in motel courtyards, and i feel like that's part of the immigrant story, too, that we're not all sad and elegant and noble.
• WT:  i do the same thing where i'm attracted to writing about trashy things.  [...]  but the way the market works is that i get called up to write about [this new chinese restaurant or this new chinese thing].
• WT:  do i have to say every time that i'm from tennessee and that's not weird?

re:  any advice for people who are writing family and family dynamics.

• EWW:  families are so different, and the ways in which families relate to each other are so different.
• WT:  one thing i've been thinking about is that i've often felt drawn to writing about my family.  it's just important to be writing it because that's so much a human solution to figuring problems out.  i think, for a long time, i was writing for the sake of just writing it.  i think just the act of writing is important for figuring out those solutions.
• ASK:  isn't there some writer who said to write like your family's dead or you're dead, like everybody's dead?

audience q&a (or, really, just the As)

• EWW:  i remember my mom was a really big fan of connie chung when i was a kid.  [...]  apparently, though, at one point, some asian society of something wanted to award her with something, and she denied it, saying that she didn't want to be recognized as an asian-american news anchor, just as a news anchor.  and, after that, my mom hated her.  and that came to mind because i feel like we're at an interesting place where those of us who are asian-american writers [are in the forefront and not in the forefront] ...?
• WT:  i think we're always writing for white people.  i always try to retain one thing in an essay or in an article where this thing is for me and for people like me and not to pander to white people.  i haven't often worked with non-white editors, and white editors often just don't get it.
• ASK:  it's an interesting negotiation.  i guess the more and more you write, the more you see now that people want you because you're asian or want you to be more asian or you're not asian enough, whatever that means.  as i keep writing, i keep going back to writing asian or asian-american characters.  it's nice to be in a literary world that encourages that more than before.
• EWW:  i remember, when i was a younger writer, i actually wrote under a white pseudonym, and i never wanted someone to see a photo of me or know that i was asian because i was afraid they wouldn't be interested.  it did take a while to feel that these are things that people might be interested in.
• ASK:  and now we know that michael derrick hudson just wants to be us.
• WT:  not to be a white person advocate, but there are good white people and good white editors.  and white people with diverse experiences.
• EWW:  i think the most challenging thing to me when it comes to writing about mental illness -- i think, just, for me, it's mostly to do with just conveying as much detail as possible, as with most things writing related.  to not take those shortcuts of, "oh, i saw this thing, and i thought it was there, but it wasn't -- oh, i guess it was a hallucination!"  delusions in particular can be difficult, but the more granular you can get, the more detailed you can get, the more you can convey this unusual experience that most people will never have ...

emma cline!

2016 june 14 at bookcourt:  the third kind of book event is where you go in, thumbs too tired for notes, and find yourself absolutely charmed.  emma cline (the girls) (on the right) read (very briefly) (she said she read a very, very short passage because those are the book events she likes) then had a lovely conversation with alexandra kleeman (author of the fabulous you took can have a body like mine).

(it must be noted that i feel an automatic kinship with people from california.  it's like this weird sense of camaraderie that i feel with a sense of nostalgia, like we share this connection to a past because i have no intention of moving back to california, so i allow myself the freedom to view it fondly.)

---

• emma cline:  california's such a weird place.
  • alexandra kleeman:  i was born in berkeley then i went back to berkeley and i will never live there again.
  • EC:  it's such a beautiful landscape, but there's a latent danger in the landscape.  like, it's on a fault line, so it's beautiful, but it's also trying to kill you.
• AK:  i felt like evie could have existed at any time because the essence of the girl is still the same.
  • EC:  it's sort of a timeless desire to be known or belong.
• EC:  i read a lot of groupie memoirs.  which were surprisingly fantastic.  you're supposed to read them and be taken by the male singers, but, in the end, i always took away that it was the women who were putting in all this energy in the creating of these myths [of these men].  the men always came across to me as very flat.
• EC:  i think friendship is a great realm for fiction.  it's murky.  we don't have such cultural codes around them like we do for romantic relationships or family relationships.
  • AK:  in friendship, i feel like there's a pressure to have it maintain exactly the same [way] or it'll fall apart.
• EC:  teenage girls are given so little power and agency, so the little they do get -- i'm interested in how they wield it.
• EC:  one thing i remember [from reading my teenage journals] -- everything had the pitch of a crime.  for adolescents, everything is life or death.
• EC:  i think, with an MFA, you have to encounter the fact of having readers.
• AK:  i feel like, with debut novels, we discharge the things we've been obsessed with since we were fifteen.

eric ripert!

2016 june 08 at powerhouse arena with bon appetit's adam rapoport!  (ripert is on the left.)

i find that there are two kinds of book events (ok, really, three):  there's the kind where i'm following along with my thumbs, trying to catch as many words as i can, and then there's the kind where i'm not so obsessive, simply enjoying the moment.  i love both kinds -- there's a different kind of rapt attention they both command -- though i suppose the latter is less useful for this site.

as it goes, tonight's event with eric ripert was the latter.  ripert is basically what you'd expect in person -- he's charming, funny, open -- and it was just fun to be able to sit and listen to him chat with rapoport.  i have fewer notes from tonight, but maybe that means y'all should just goand read his memoir, 32 yolks, which i absolutely loved -- he made me cry, made me laugh, and left me feeling full and satisfied and encouraged to keep on doing what i'm doing.

(32 yolks also really encapsulated what it is i love about passion, which i posted about here.  i did a micro-review of the book here.)

---

adam rapoport:  what is more difficult -- working the line as a terrified 17-year-old or writing a book about being a terrified 17-year-old?

eric ripert:  writing a book is a process -- as you know, it's not easy.  thank god i had veronica.

ER:  working the line in the 80s was terrifying.  i was the youngest one in the kitchen, and i was coming from culinary school and realized that i wasn't really at that level.

AR:  i mean, you were kind of an idiot in the kitchen at first.  [on his first day at la tour d'argent, ripert cut his finger.  then he failed to make the hollandaise.  then he didn't know what chervil was.  in two weeks, he poured a pot of lobster stock on himself, badly scalding his feet.]  what made you think you knew how to cook?

ER:  [re:  the chervil]  in culinary school, you don't have expensive ingredients to cook with, so, often, they replace the ingredients with something else.  [if they were able to get fish or meat, everyone in the class would get a little bit.]  you have exposure to the knowledge, but you don't really master the recipe or the technique.

ER:  [re:  writing about his childhood]  i wanted to put it in the book because i wanted the book to be inspirational on many levels and potentially touch people who are having problems as a couple or as children.

AR:  you were an only child.

ER:  yes.

AR:  and you have one child.

ER:  yes.  [...]  i have one child for different reasons.

AR:  what's interesting in the book is how vividly you write about food at such an early age.  were you really that attentive?

ER:  oh, yes.  when i did the book, i realized that my long-term memory is amazing, and i can remember from three-and-a-half years old vividly.  my short-term memory is destroyed.  especially when it comes to food, i remember everything, every detail.  for me, it's very easy to go back into those scenes and go into those details like we did for the book.

AR read a passage from 32 yolks:

there are dozens of lakes in the mountains of andorra.  during our years living there, we'd gotten to know which waters had the most trout to be caught.  [...]  my mother would poach the just-caught trout in a big pot set over a camping stove.  when the fish was almost done, she would add a dash of vinegar to the court bouillon in which she was poaching the trout.  that burst of acidity caused the skin of the fish to turn blue -- a rare delicacy i'd read about in one of her cookbooks.  then she would reduce the liquid, emulsify it with a little butter, and serve it as a sauce for the fish.  (88)

AR:  who reduced a sauce on a camping trip?!  did you think this was normal?

ER:  yes!

ER:  [re:  fine dining]  i loved the formality of the staff.  i loved that it was this entire room, and there was this valet of people serving people, and i had a passion for that.  look, for me, i was born with passion, so i recognized that --

AR:  did you know that when you were that age?

ER:  yes.  i knew i had a passion for eating but not so much for cooking -- that would come later.

AR:  why did you think you were not a good student?

ER:  for many reasons.  one of them, when i was seven years old, i was so good in school, they made me jump a grade.  when i went to the following grade, i was completely lost, and, moving on, i was always behind, so i started sitting in the back of the class and became the clown.  in culinary school, i excelled.

ER:  cooking is craftsmanship.  artistry comes later on.  when you have mastered all the craftsmanship, then you can start to be creative and have artistic visions, and, when you have the visions, you have the technique to back them up.

[ER got his job at la tour after he wrote to all the michelin-starred restaurants in paris after culinary school.  la tour is the only one that replied.]

ER:  it's virtually impossible to come out of culinary school onto the line of a michelin-starred restaurant.

[why is his memoir titled 32 yolks?  on his first day at la tour d'argent:]

tirade over, he [maurice] asked me to make the hollandaise, adding, as though it was nothing, "thirty-two yolks, okay?"

"oui, chef," i dutifully replied.

this seemingly easy task would be the thing that broke me, showing me the gap between culinary school knowledge and real restaurant chops.  to start, it took me almost twenty minutes to separate the eggs.  none of the guys around me lifted their heads from their stations when i asked what to do with the whites.  they were too deep in their tasks, moving with a smooth, mechanic urgency as they prepared their mise en place for the first service, slicing leeks as fine as eyelashes and "turning" carrots into perfect barrel shapes.  stopping for ten seconds to answer a basic question was unthinkable.

when i approached the waldorf with my pan, the hairs on my forearms curled up and singed into nothing.  i tried to negotiate for my own twenty inches of space with a cook who was calmly adding lobsters to a massive pot of stock.  but even then, i didn't have the strength to move thirty-two yolks and make a light and foamy sabayon.  i didn't know to feel the temperature of the pan with the back of my hand.  i didn't know how to instinctively intuit the right temperature to cook the eggs so that they would become that magical sauce.  i didn't know and i couldn't ask -- this was la tour, not cooking school -- so i failed, at the simplest of tasks.  maurice was so shocked when he discovered my incompetence that he said nothing, just took the pan out of my hand and looked upward, as if demanding celestial intervention.  (124)

ER:  it took me weeks, maybe months, to master the sabayon, and, by the time i mastered that, [i had become part of the kitchen].

ER:  i didn't want to do anything else.  i had a strong passion to be a chef, and i knew i had to pay my dues.

ER:  anyone in a professional kitchen can't do much by himself.

lucy kalanithi!

2016 may 9 at random house:  lucy kalanithi is the widow of paul kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who passed away from cancer last year.  he loved literature and studied english in college, and, after he was diagnosed, he wrote two beautiful essays, the first in the new york times titled "how long have i got left?" and the second in stanford medicine a few months before he passed, "before i go."  his book, when breath becomes air, was published by random house this january.

lucy kalanithi is an incredible woman -- poised, articulate, thoughtful.  she wrote a poignant piece for the new york times, "my marriage didn't end when i became a widow," and she's an internist who is also involved in changing the ways medicine approaches end-of-life care/decisions.

she was in conversation with glamour's liz egan.

---

liz egan:  this book has been out for exactly four months.  can you tell us a little bit about how your life has [changed or not]?

lucy kalanithi:  it's funny because today is exactly fourteen months since paul died, and this book, for our family, has been one of the best things, and paul would have been thrilled to see what has happened and the conversations it's generated.  it's kind of a disorienting time for me, too, because it's kind of weird to be public but also to be so lonely at the same time.  being a doctor, the topic's are near and dear to my heart, too, so i can see my future stretching out in ways that i didn't expect to, so the book isn't just the past but also the present.

LK:  i did this early interview with a reporter from elle who said, "so, this might end up on people's shelves next to the year of magical thinking," and i was like, "are you serious?"  [...]  andy ward, the editor, wrote [paul] this really nice letter saying that [random house] would approach [the book] to get it to be a new york times bestseller, and paul was like, "seriously?"

LK:  he was writing it as a journal but also to bring people into this experience.

LE:  his first step onto the world stage was i believe january 24, 2014, when he published a piece in the new york times called "how long have i got left."

LK:  it was surprising and great.  there was that essay, and there was another, and that was the one that ends with a love letter to our daughter, and he was around to see the response to that.  [at the time, paul was pretty much restrained to their home.]  to have this social media response to an essay -- social media really enables you to feel like you're participating in the world; it's one of the great things it can do.  he was grateful for that.

LE:  how did you find the courage to write [your new york times] piece?

LK:  it was -- again, paul really liked the process of writing, and i find it a real struggle and had a lot of help with those essays.  i felt like my heart ended up on the page, and that feels amazing to have that.  when i was working on that piece, someone gave me the advice that the more sensory detail you can give, that's what makes it really universal, that people can empathize with it.  when they asked me to write the epilogue [to when breath becomes air], i didn't know if i could do that, if i could follow paul, and, if he could have done it, to write about his death, he would have done that.  it felt, as with everything else, like doing a service to him.

LE:  there was a phrase in your epilogue -- you write about the ways in which you took care of him, and, also, you said, "with music and the simple act of witnessing."  can you talk a little bit about why it's so different and also why it's so important?

LK:  i think that when someone is really ill or terminally ill, all you can do a lot of the time is just sit with it.  and being able to do that for someone else -- "i'm here for you no matter what happens."  "i'm here with you."  paul and i escaped a lot of emotions, like anger, [but there were other ones] and i think we could just with them.

LK:  [did an interview with charlie rose earlier in the day]  he [charlie rose] asked, "what do you regret?", and i said i didn't have much to regret because we sat in the muck together and talked through it so much.

LE:  how would you respond to all the people -- when someone is that sick, there's always someone who wants to assure you that you will get better, you'll be all right.  i think it takes some bravery to sit with it and say that, no, there is no happy ending, this is it.

LK:  paul's parents were in that camp, and i think that narrative helps some people.

LE:  how would you handle that?

LK:  i think, for me, that narrative was less helpful.  i think it's a human response -- even in medicine, the way we talk about things are hopeful.  i wouldn't begrudge someone that because whatever narrative that helps you cope is fine.

LE:  i think people always want to know what they can do.  are there things you would say to those who know someone who is [ill]?

LK:  what paul found really helpful was people showing up and acting the ways they did before.  [not like pretending everything was okay.]  like, his friends were really humorous and made a lot of jokes, and they would come and make jokes about the bed rail.  just because you're sick doesn't mean you're not you anymore.

LK:  my mom has this great advice:  when it doubt, describe.

LK:  i think, after paul died, people are afraid to talk about him.  but the person left behind is always thinking about it.

LE:  he wrote so much about language and what he loved reading.  are there books that you've read that have been particularly helpful?

LK:  when we were decided to have a baby, i read far from the tree.  it's basically about -- andrew solomon embarks on this quest to -- he himself is both gay and dyslexic -- and he learned that his mom was really supportive about his dyslexia but not about him being gay.  each chapter is about how a child is different from a parent.  the upshot is that he thinks that most families are really resilient and will do anything for each other.  in the end, he and his partner decide to have children.  it deepened my desire to have a child.

LK:  since paul died, i've read some poetry that's been really nice.  there's this really long elizabethan poem ["caelica 83"] that the epigraph of paul's book is from and the title is taken from.  it's greville mourning the death of his friend, and he just goes on and on and on about al the things he misses.

LE:  [mentions w.s. merwin's "separation" and quote it]

your absence has gone through me
like thread through a needle. 
everything i do is stitched with its color.

LE:  did he leave a book for you?

LK:  no.

[he left a book for his parents, the title of which i apparently did not write down, but, if i can find it, i'll update this.]

LK:  that book is actually really helpful.  it's super christian, and it's super agonizing about losing a son, and one of paul's friends sent it to him when he was diagnosed, then he wanted me to give it to his parents, which i did.  they both read it, and his dad carried it around for weeks, kind of like an amulet.

LE:  you have now been interviewed many times.  is there a question you wish you'd been asked?

LK:  i don't think so, but i say this because i've learned this technique where you can say whatever you want to whichever question.

LK:  when i started doing interviews, i was afraid that people would treat me with kid gloves.

LE:  do you feel you've entered the new normal?

LK:  not quite.  again because this has been so topsy turvy.  although this funny thing happened when paul got sick, that the future shrank down.  i knew we had months to a couple years, so the future was a lot shorter, so i learned to live in the present.  so i haven't really learned to live in the new normal, but i'm okay with it.

[audience Q&As]

LK:  even when we got engaged, he was going to be a psychiatrist, so i thought i was going to marry a literary psychiatrist.  so he really surprised me and his friends when he decided to become a neurosurgeon.

LK:  i don't love the operating room.  it's freezing cold; there are no windows; and the patient's asleep -- it's just not my scene.  you have to love it to be a surgeon.  he loved it.  i think the physical technical aspects of it didn't come as naturally to him as it did for other people.  like, he was a terrible driver -- he would be so mad at me for saying this -- [so he had to work hard at it].

LK:  there were three charities we found really helpful.  [lung cancer]'s a weirdly stigmatized illness, so the charities -- i love the lung cancer communities.  it's a very strong and compassionate community.  we liked team draft, and paul's oncologist really liked an organization called free to breathe, and there's another one called bonnie j. addario lung cancer foundation.  they were really helpful to us, even being doctors.

LK:  one of my attendings once said, "sometimes, it's nice to start a sentence with 'i wish,' like 'i really wish you could be cured" -- so you get out what you want to express while realizing you probably won't get it.

LK:  i think there is so much you can provide and you are providing just by being there and someone knowing you're there.

LK:  his death makes me really feel and empathize with the disorienting [aspect] of being sick.  so i feel encouraged to explore that space with patients and to think about -- there are all these things we can do with medicine, but what can do to maximize thins for you?  also, [within medicine], i get to talk about end-of-life care, so being able to talk about that is really compelling to me and gives me a sense of purpose going forward.

LK:  i think being in medicine -- once i entered medical school, i felt like that was a point of transition for me, so i think practicing medicine made me more present in a certain way.  and paul talks in the beginning of the book about troubles we were having in our marriage and how we were missing these attempts to communicate, so i think [we were] probably less present [then].  so i think this will change me going forward, but i think [being present]'s a challenge for everyone.