Goodbye, Vitamin
Rachel Khong'Half stand-up comic, half seismographer of the human heart ... Khong writes with a gentle humour 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
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 a woman at a crossroads, 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.
'One of the funniest elegiac novels I have ever read' - David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language of Cranes