Walking the Night Road

Alexandra Butler's account of her parents' deaths is engaging and affecting. Boomers and their children will learn much from this memoir as they themselves approach the finitude of life. -- Andrew Achenbaum, Professor of Social Work at the University of Houston An honest look at marriage, aging, happiness, and survival-both wise and funny. You will walk the Night Road too. -- Barbara Walters A detailed, beautifully written, insightful account of the process of dying and of living-it's difficult to put down. Butler is able to use her words to breathe life into the people she is writing about and provide the reader with an ability to enter their lives as observers who can nearly feel the sun, shudder in the cold, and hear the creak of the floors. -- Jeanette Takamura, Dean, Columbia School of Social Work This book is Ms. Butler's passionate account of her fight to help her mother, the author of works on mental health and aging, Myrna Lewis, in her battle against a malignant brain tumor. The depth of her grief and her fury against a foe she knew must win is palpable on every page. -- Peter Pouncey, Author of Rules for Old Men Waiting Alexandra Butler's memoir of the last year-and-a-half of her mother's life is a searing, exquisitely written, brilliant work. Its honesty, insight, and poetic sensitivity left us deeply moved, far more so than anything else we've read in many years. It is truly a magnificent accomplishment. -- Lawrence K. Grossman, Former president of NBC News and PBS I read this book in one sitting last night and it is really remarkable. She captures, a la Virginia Woolf, the inner voice and experience of illness, death and grief in a way I have not seen before. Lots of talent there. -- Diane Meier, Director of Center to Advance Palliative Care The vivid, expressive intelligence of the writing made the exploding consequences of Myrna's cancer invade my mind in ways that were deeply moving and instructive. I was struck by the author's skill as a writer from the devastating start of the book, in which Myrna has already crossed the threshold into a world from which she can't return. It reads like a nightmare at first, but then settles into the pit of the stomach as not nightmare at all, not even the cultural nightmare of cancer as dread incarnate, but as our everyday, waking reality transformed into a bizarre parallel universe. Butler has composed a particular and telling vignette with implications beyond her immediate circumstances-a tragi-comic subtext to the way many of us are driven to organize our lives in unbroken chains of projects. -- Joan Retallack, John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities, Bard College I read it in one sitting. I laughed; I cried my eyes out; I related the whole way. And the beauty of it is that my mother does not have cancer. No one has cancer. It's the relationship and the feelings, deep to the core. This is not about cancer. It's about people, about the relationship between the people and the journey. I bet that people will relate no matter what kind of death or loss. -- Joan Siffert, Senior Vice President of Development at Gilda's Club Beautifully and skillfully written. -- Rabbi Harold S. Kushner Beautiful, heartbreaking and incisive, Butler's memoir is a brutally honest retelling of her mother's tragic battle against cancer. Her words go beyond just grief, they inspire a greater understanding of what it means to be a child, and how the lines that define familial roles are often more complex and messy than they seem. A child is never just a child. A parent never just a parent. Walking the Night Road is a cathartic tribute to anyone who has ever lost a parent. -- Will Reiser, Screenwriter, 50/50 Butler has written a moving and powerful book about the unlikely blessings that a death can bring. Anyone who has lost a loved one-or indeed anyone who has unwillingly embarked on an adventure only to find themselves in a better place-will enjoy this account. She reminds us all that hardships can sometimes be gifts wrapped in pain. We just need to see them that way. -- Dan Buettner, Author, The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World's Healthiest People Butler gives an exceptionally full-bodied description of family life, with its enduring connections, weaknesses, cruelties and warmth. -- Terri Apter Times Literary Supplement