Goodbye, Vitamin

Author(s): Rachel Khong

fiction a-z

Hello, ageing parents. Hello, dementia. Goodbye, vitamin...Ruth is thirty and her life is falling apart: she and her fiance are moving house, but he's moving out to live with another woman; her career is going nowhere; and then she learns that her father, a history professor beloved by his students, has Alzheimer's. At Christmas, her mother begs her to stay on and help - for a year. Goodbye, Vitamin is the wry, beautifully observed story of that year, as Ruth and her friends attempt to shore up her father's career, she and her mother obsess over the ambiguous health benefits - in the absence of a cure - of dried jellyfish supplements and vitamin pills, and they all try to forge a new relationship with the brilliant, childlike, irascible, sweet old man her father has become. 'Rachel Khong's first novel sneaks up on you - just like life, illness and heartbreak. And love. A million small, human and often deeply funny details gather force to tell a tale that is ultimately, incredibly poignant' Miranda July


Product Information

'Goodbye, Vitamin builds with humor, gusto and such deceptive lightness that the reader wonders, at its devastating end, how debut author Rachel Khong managed to pull it off so beautifully. The only possible answer is that Khong is a magician, and we are lucky to fall under her spell at the beginning of her brilliant writing life' -- Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies Rachel Khong's first novel sneaks up on you - just like life, illness and heartbreak. And love. A million small, human and often deeply funny details gather force to tell a tale that is ultimately, incredibly poignant -- Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man 'Tragic and funny' Entertainment Weekly, 'Most Anticipated Books of 2017' Half stand-up comic, half seismographer of the human heart, Rachel Khong's debut novel gives a moving account of the ways in which illness breaks and remakes bonds. Khong writes 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 -- Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine 'One of the funniest elegiac novels I have ever read, and also one of the gutsiest. Rarely has gravitas been handled with such lightness of touch, or a sad story told so happily' -- David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language of Cranes

Rachel Khong studied at Yale and the University of Florida. Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Believer, Pitchfork and Village Voice. In 2013, she was named one of Refinery29's 30 under 30. Goodbye, Vitamin is her first novel.

General Fields

  • : 9781471159480
  • : Scribner
  • : Scribner
  • : January 2017
  • : 216mm X 135mm
  • : June 2017
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Rachel Khong
  • : Paperback
  • : Export
  • : en
  • : 813
  • : 256