Kate Gross - Late Fragments

Rating 4/5

Review:
Well written, touching and perceptive

This is a good book. It is well written, thoughtful and well worth reading by anyone involved in any way with terminal disease. Kate Gross manages to talk honestly about aspects of her life, her cancer ("The Nuisance") and her impending death largely without sentimentality and sometimes with great perceptiveness.

I find it almost impossible to review this book in any great depth for two reasons. One is that it seems almost unbearably inhuman to criticise anything at all about such a sincere and un-self-pitying account. The other is that I have had far, far too much experience of this sort of thing, including my beloved sister dying of cancer in very similar circumstances. Objective analysis is therefore very difficult and, to be honest, far too painful, but as a brief personal perspective:

A lot of the book is readable, thoughtful and touching. I didn't find all of it brilliant - having terminal cancer does not automatically grant someone superhuman wisdom - but Kate Gross was already a thoughtful, intelligent woman before her cancer and she offers some very good reflections and insights. One section that I thought was especially good was the brief passage about what Kate wanted from people supporting her. She acknowledges that people often don't know what to do and lays out very frank and sensible rules and advice. Examples include: offer help, then "offer again in six months time because the chances are that that is the point at which everyone else will have stopped offering help", or "Remember this is not about *you*. The point is not to burnish your halo, but to help." Oh, yes.

She also says things I don't agree with, like "There's really nothing you can say that will make things worse, after all." Kate plainly didn't hear some of the presumably well-intentioned but crass, stupid and deeply upsetting things which were said to my sister, but there is a good deal of very good stuff here about a variety of things in life and in death and there's bound to be a difference of view occasionally.

My overall verdict is that this is well worth reading. It's nothing like some of the self-indulgent misery memoirs which have been published: it's well written, thoughtful and offers some important insights. Recommended.