My mother’s friend Marina Vaizey wrote an obituary that ran in London’s The Guardian. It began: “Mary Anne Schwalbe, who has died aged 75, was one of my closest friends for more than 50 years. We met when she was the head girl at school—and a subtly effective leader at that early age. Mary Anne was an outstanding listener and teacher, which even encompassed passing on grandparenting practice.”
It then described some of Mom’s passions and jobs and accomplishments. It ended: “This dynamo of energy was contained in a small, quiet, smiling, elegantly dressed woman, who could appear as conventional as a lady who lunched, but travelled the world often in desperately trying circumstances: she was an electoral observer in the Balkans, and was shot at in Afghanistan. Mary Anne saw the worst and believed the best.”
I think Marina got it exactly right. Mom taught me not to look away from the worst but to believe that we can all do better. She never wavered in her conviction that books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose—electronic (even though that wasn’t for her) or printed, or audio—is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation. Mom taught me that you can make a difference in the world and that books really do matter: they’re how we know what we need to do in life, and how we tell others. Mom also showed me, over the course of two years and dozens of books and hundreds of hours in hospitals, that books can be how we get closer to each other, and stay close, even in the case of a mother and son who were very close to each other to begin with, and even after one of them has died.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I mentioned people in this book according to whether they happened to be involved in a particular story or incident, and not according to their importance in Mom’s life or mine. I want to thank our wonderful friends and extraordinay extended family, who answered questions, provided letters and stories, and encouraged me in the writing of this book. I decided not to try to list you below only because I was too worried about accidentally leaving someone out; but I am grateful beyond words to all of you.
I received invaluable help on the manuscript from James Goldsmith III (my uncle Skip), Stephanie Green, Jean Halberstam, Lisa Holton, Beena Kamlani, Larry Kramer, Pablo Larios, Georganne Nixon, Mary Ellen O’Neill, Bill Reichblum, David Shipley, Peternelle van Arsdale, the Tutorial, Leslie Wells, and Naomi Wolf. Alice Truax provided, once again, probing questions and an eagle eye.
I’m grateful to Mary Oliver and also Regula Noetzli.
Doug Stumpf and Lisa Queen were among my first readers. Lisa gave me daily encouragement, wisdom, and laughs. I couldn’t have written this without her. Doug was, as ever, ridiculously generous with his time and genius.
Some of this book was written at the Fire Island home of Andy Brimmer and Tom Molner. I owe them (literally) for this and for so much more.
For their help with information about the Women’s Refugee Commission and the IRC, immense thanks to Susan Stark Alberti, George Biddle, Carolyn Makinson, Diana Quick, and Carrie Welch.
I’m endlessly grateful to John Brockman and Katinka Matson, and also to Max Brockman, Russell Weinberger, and Michael Healey. There are no better people to have in your corner.
Lisa Highton, publisher of Two Roads UK, helped me more than I can say with her humor, empathy, brilliant counsel, and steadfast faith in this book and me.
I owe huge thanks to Sonny Mehta, for his immediate and unwavering support, and to the amazing team at Knopf: Paul Bogaards, Gabrielle Brooks, Andrew Michael Carlson, Carol Devine Carson, Chris Gillespie, Erinn Hartman, Lynn Kovach, Nicholas Latimer, Victoria Pearson, Anne-Lise Spitzer, and Jeff Yamaguchi, along with their colleagues.
Marty Asher is simply the editor of my dreams. Marty encouraged me to do this book. He coaxed and pushed and edited and guided me through draft after draft. Finally, he told me I could stop. The myriad flaws and failings are all due to my not listening sufficiently to Marty. But even in the face of my intransigence, he remains as extraordinary a champion and friend as any book or writer could ever have.
This book is in memory of my mother, of course, but also of Mary Diaz and Al Marchioni, who both died of pancreatic cancer, and of Beverlee Bruce. Mary and Beverlee were two of Mom’s most beloved colleagues and were an inspiration to her and all of us. Al Marchioni was one of the best people I will ever know. I was blessed to have him as my boss, friend, and mentor.
Again, my father and Doug and Nina provided constant and selfless help and loving support, while encouraging me to write the book I wanted to write.
As for David Cheng: I don’t deserve someone as wonderful as David, and he sure doesn’t deserve someone as trying as me. But I’m insanely lucky and he’s incredibly patient. He’s the light of my life.
And finally, I want to thank my mother.
APPENDIX
An alphabetical listing of the authors, books, plays, poems, and stories discussed or mentioned in The End of Your Life Book Club:
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio
W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” from Collected Poems
Jane Austen
Russell Banks, Continental Drift
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated by Alison Anderson
Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone
Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
The Holy Bible
Elizabeth Bishop
Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer
The Book of Common Prayer
Geraldine Brooks, March; People of the Book
The Buddha, The Diamond Cutter Sutra, translated by Gelong Thubten Tsultrim
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Robert Chapman, Billy Budd, play and screenplay, with Louis O. Coxe
Sindy Cheung, “I Am Sorrow”
Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Agatha Christie
Karen Connelly, The Lizard Cage
Pat Conroy, The Great Santini
Colin Cotterill
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Patrick Dennis, Auntie Mame
Charles Dickens
Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer; The Year of Magical Thinking
Siobhan Dowd
Nancy Hatch Dupree
Dave Eggers
T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
Ralph Waldo Emerson
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Zelda Fitzgerald
Ian Fleming, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
Esther Forbes, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In; Johnny Tremain
E. M. Forster, Howards End
Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
Erle Stanley Gardner
Nikki Giovanni
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Sue Grafton
Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
The Haggadah
David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter
Susan Halpern, The Etiquette of Illness
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train; The Price of Salt; The Talented Mr. Ripley
Andrew Holleran
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner; A Thousand Splendid Suns
Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories; Christopher and His Kind
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
Ben Johnson, Volpone
Crockett Johnson, Harold and the Purple Crayon
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living; Wherever You Go,
There You Are; Coming to Our Senses
Walter Kaiser
Mariatu Kamara, The Bite of the Mango, with Susan
McClelland
Carolyn Keene, Nancy Drew series
John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage
Elizabeth T. King
Larry Kramer
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies; The Namesake; Unaccustomed Earth
Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies
Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, translated by Reg Keeland
Victor LaValle, Big Machine
Munro Leaf, The Story of Ferdinand, illustrated by Robert Lawson
Dennis Lehane
Donna Leon
C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone; Where Eagles Dare; Force 10 from Navarone; Puppet on a Chain
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley
Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger; Death in Venice; The Magic Mountain; Mario and the Magician; Joseph and His Brothers, translated by John E. Woods
Ngaio Marsh
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage; The Painted Veil; Collected Short Stories, including “The Verger”
James McBride, The Color of Water
Val McDermid
Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach
Herman Melville, Billy Budd
James Michener
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
J. R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar
Toni Morrison
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness
Iris Murdoch
Nagarjuna, Seventy Verses on Emptiness, translated by Gareth Sparham
Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française, translated by Sandra Smith
Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father
John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra
Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early, including “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?”
Frances Osborne, The Bolter
Sara Paretsky
Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture, with Jeffrey Zaslow
Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience
Harold Pinter, The Caretaker
Reynolds Price, Feasting the Heart
Thomas Pynchon
Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons
David Reuben, M.D., Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex: But Were Afraid to Ask
David K. Reynolds, A Handbook for Constructive Living
F. W. Robertson
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping; Gilead; Home
David Rohde
John Ruskin
Tim Russert, Big Russ and Me
David Sedaris
Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are; In the Night Kitchen
Peter Shaffer; Equus; Five Finger Exercise
William Shakespeare, King Lear; Othello
George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan
Bernie Siegel, M.D., Love, Medicine and Miracles
Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency: The Miracle at Speedy Motors
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Natsume Soseki, Kokoro, translated by Edwin McCellan
Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
Edward Steichen, The Family of Man, prologue by Carl Sandburg
Wallace Stevens
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Josephine Tey, Brat Farrar
William Makepeace Thackeray
Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down
Mary Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs
Colm Tóibín, The Story of the Night; The Blackwater Lightship; The Master; Brooklyn
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit; The Lord of the Rings
William Trevor, Felicia’s Journey
Liv Ullmann
John Updike, Couples; My Father’s Tears
Leon Uris
Marina Vaizey
Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us
Elie Wiesel, Night
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
P. G. Wodehouse
Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception
Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny; Marjorie Morningstar; The Winds of War
Brief excerpts were originally published in different form in The New York Times (May 13, 2012).
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
The Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency Inc.: “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?” from Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver, copyright © 2004 by Mary Oliver (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). Reprinted by permission of The Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency Inc.
Random House, Inc., and Curtis Brown, Ltd.: Excerpt from “Musée des Beaux Arts” from Collected Poems of W. H. Auden by W. H. Auden, copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., on behalf of print rights and Curtis Brown, Ltd., on behalf of electronic rights.
A Note About the Author
WILL SCHWALBE has worked in digital media, as the founder of Cookstr.com; in book publishing, as senior vice president and editor in chief, first of William Morrow and Company and then of Hyperion Books; and as a journalist, writing for publications including The New York Times and the South China Morning Post. At Hyperion, he created Hyperion East, an imprint devoted to Asian fiction in translation. He is on the boards of Yale University Press and the Kings-borough Community College Foundation. He is the coauthor with David Shipley of Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better.
The End of Your Life Book Club
By Will Schwalbe
Reading Group Guide
ABOUT THIS READING GROUP GUIDE
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of The End of Your Life Book Club, the poignant, funny, and deeply moving memoir by Will Schwalbe.
ABOUT THE BOOK
“Sharing books he loved with his savvy New Yorker mom had always been a great pleasure for both mother and son, becoming especially poignant when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, at age 73 … The books they shared allowed them to speak honestly and thoughtfully, to get to know each other, ask big questions, and especially talk about death. With a refreshing forthrightness, and an excellent list of books included, this is an astonishing, pertinent, and wonderfully welcome work.”
—Publishers Weekly
“What are you reading?”
That’s the question Will Schwalbe asks his mother, Mary Anne, as they sit in the waiting room of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In 2007, Mary Anne returned from a humanitarian trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan suffering from what her doctors believed was a rare type of hepatitis. Months later she was diagnosed with a form of advanced pancreatic cancer, which is almost always fatal, often in six months or less.
This is the inspiring true story of a son and his mother, who start a “book club” that brings them together as her life comes to a close. Over the next two years, Will and Mary Anne carry on conversations that are both wide-ranging and deeply personal, prompted by an eclectic array of books and a shared passion for reading. Their list jumps from classic to popular, from poetry to mysteries, from fantastic to spiritual. The issues they discuss include questions of faith and courage as well as everyday topics such as expressing gratitude and learning to listen. Throughout, mother and son are constantly reminded of the power of books to comfort us, astonish us, teach us, and tell us what we need to do with our lives and in the world. Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dying.
Will and Mary Anne share their hopes and concerns with each other—and rediscover their lives—through their favorite books. When they read, they aren’t a sick person and a well person, but a mother and a son taki
ng a journey together. The result is a profoundly moving tale of loss that is also a joyful, and often humorous, celebration of life: Will’s love letter to his mother, and theirs to the printed page.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Does this book have a central theme? What is it?
2. Why does Mary Anne always read a book’s ending first? How does this reflect her character?
3. Early in the book, Will writes, “I wanted to learn more about my mother’s life and the choices she’d made, so I often steered the conversation there. She had an agenda of her own, as she almost always did. It took me some time, and some help, to figure it out.” (this page) What was Mary Anne’s agenda?
4. Mary Anne underlined a passage in Seventy Verses on Emptiness, which resonated with Will: “Permanent is not; impermanent is not; a self is not; not a self [is not]; clean is not; not clean is not; happy is not; suffering is not.” Why did this strike both of them as significant? What do you think it means?
5. Throughout the book, Will talks about books as symbols and sources of hope. How has reading books served a similar function for you?
6. While reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, Will and Mary Anne discuss three kinds of fateful choices: “the ones characters make knowing that they can never be undone; the ones they make thinking they can but learn they can’t; and the ones they make thinking they can’t and only later come to understand, when it’s too late, when ‘nothing can be undone,’ that they could have.” (this page) What kind of choices did Mary Anne make during her cancer treatment? Did she or Will make any of the third type?
7. Mary Anne especially liked a passage from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson: “When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?” (this page) Why do you think this moved her so much? What did it mean to Will?
8. How does religious belief help Mary Anne? How do you think it might have helped Will?
9. Mary Anne doesn’t believe her travels to war-torn countries were brave: “I wanted to go to all those places, so how could that be brave? The people I’m talking about, they did things they didn’t want to do because they felt they had to, or because they thought it was the right thing to do.” (this page) In what ways is Mary Anne brave during her cancer treatments? Does she ever come to think of herself as brave?