Amy Bloom: In Love, A Memoir of Love and Loss

Barrett Bookstore and Darien Library are pleased to welcome Amy Bloom for a live, in-person conversation about her new memoir, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss, on Tuesday, March 22 at 7PM. This event will be held at Darien Library.

REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED FOR THIS FREE EVENT – PLEASE CLICK HERE TO REGISTER.

ABOUT IN LOVE: A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND LOSS

Amy Bloom won acclaim for both her fiction and nonfiction triumphs, including two New York Times bestselling novels. Now, with her next book, Amy turns the lens inwards in IN LOVE: A Memoir of Love and Loss (Random House, on sale March 8th), a courageous memoir that challenges: what are you willing to do for the one you love? And what is our own right to die?

Dignitas is a Swiss nonprofit organization providing assisted suicide to those who suffer from terminal illness and/or severe physical and/or mental illnesses, allowing them to end their own life painlessly and with dignity and peace. For Bloom’s husband, Brian, his reason to travel to Dignitas was Alzheimer’s disease.

Bloom first noticed changes in her husband’s lack of enthusiasm for things he once loved: his book club, retiring early from a new job and reading her own writing. Then he began to withdraw from close friendships, became confused easily and focused mostly on the past. These changes were at first subtly progressing until suddenly, the person standing before Bloom was starkly different from the man she married 13 years earlier. Their world was altered forever when an MRI confirmed Brian’s diagnoses.

Forced to confront the truth of Alzheimer’s and its impact on the future he had envisioned, Brian was determined to die on his feet, not live on his knees. It took less than a week for Brian to come to this decision, and it became Bloom’s mission to accept and honor his last request. In a powerful testament of love, Bloom chronicles their last journey together to the suburbs of Zurich.

In this heartbreaking and surprising memoir, Bloom sheds light on a part of life we so often shy away from discussing—its ending. Written in Bloom’s captivating, insightful voice and with her trademark wit and candor, IN LOVE is an unforgettable portrait of a beautiful marriage, and a boundary-defying love.

PRAISE FOR IN LOVE: A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND LOSS

“What a book this is—full of everything that matters. In Love is gripping, moving, and beautifully told. I’m so glad I read it.”
—Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion

“In Love is a buoyant and entrancing memoir about one of the worst things that can happen to a couple. Bloom’s unfiltered glimpse into a working marriage is both a touchingly besotted portrait of her husband and a wrenching account of his gradual retreat from her. Their resolute approach to his death yields up a story pulsing with raw life.”

—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home

“This is a beautiful, necessary book for anyone who loves their partner deeply and wonders and worries what the end might be like: poignant, kind, funny and ultimately redemptive. One cries a lot, in the best of ways.”
—Alain de Botton, author of The Course of Love

“A remarkable book from one of the USA’s most consistently brilliant writers. The subject is death, so the end is inevitable; but Bloom’s story is full of surprises and some of the most heartbreaking, honest and funniest writing you’ll ever read.”

–Roddy Doyle, author of Love and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

ABOUT AMY BLOOM

Amy Bloom is the author of Come to Me, a National Book Award finalist; A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Love Invents Us; Normal; Away, a New York Times bestseller; Where the God of Love Hangs Out; and Lucky Us, a New York Times bestseller. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Short Stories, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, and many other anthologies here and abroad. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Vogue, Slate, Tin House, and Salon, among other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. She is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University.

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