HOW TO BE LOVED
A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship
HOW TO BE LOVED by Eva Hagberg Fisher is a memoir about how friendship saved her life during years spent floundering against an un-diagnosable, life-threatening illness, and shot through with thoughts on addiction, pain, love and marriage, and the female body.
Eva has been in and out of oncology units for the past three years, has been diagnosed (and misdiagnosed) countless times. When Adriann first met her, she was living in a tent in the Arizona desert getting ready to die.
But she didn’t die.
Looking back on an incredible three years that held her floundering against a mysterious, undiagnosable illness, she realized that she did not find grace in sickness, and she did not become a wiser soul because of her (many) brushes with death. Everything she learned—about herself, about life, about health—she learned through the staggering love of her friends.
Like Gail Caldwell’s bestselling memoir on friendship, LET’S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME, Eva’s story is structured by illness but her disease is incidental to the broader story of friendship. This is a book about the people who sat beside her in waiting rooms, wore matching “Fuck Cancer” shirts to her oncology appointments, and cried with her when she was finally released without any follow-up appointments.
Through chapters focused on the individuals who taught her how to open her heart, HOW TO BE LOVED explores the myth of sickness and isolation in gorgeous, literary style, subverting the illness memoir as she breaks your heart.
Unlike other memoirs that focus on romantic partners coming together or breaking apart, this is a book for people who have ever loved a friend who was sick, grieving, or lost, and for people who have ever struggled to seek help or accept it.
Eva Hagberg Fisher is a writer, critic, scholar, and teacher. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Wallpaper, Wired, Architect, Dwell, among many other outlets. She is the author of It’s All In Your Head, a best-selling Kindle Single that was selected as one of the Best of the Year, two well-received books about architecture, and collaborations with design curator Paola Antonelli and the prestigious architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill on their books. Her improbable love story was featured as a Vows column in the New York Times. With a diagnosis and a long life ahead of her, she is a lecturer and PhD candidate at University of California - Berkeley.
But she didn’t die.
Looking back on an incredible three years that held her floundering against a mysterious, undiagnosable illness, she realized that she did not find grace in sickness, and she did not become a wiser soul because of her (many) brushes with death. Everything she learned—about herself, about life, about health—she learned through the staggering love of her friends.
Like Gail Caldwell’s bestselling memoir on friendship, LET’S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME, Eva’s story is structured by illness but her disease is incidental to the broader story of friendship. This is a book about the people who sat beside her in waiting rooms, wore matching “Fuck Cancer” shirts to her oncology appointments, and cried with her when she was finally released without any follow-up appointments.
Through chapters focused on the individuals who taught her how to open her heart, HOW TO BE LOVED explores the myth of sickness and isolation in gorgeous, literary style, subverting the illness memoir as she breaks your heart.
Unlike other memoirs that focus on romantic partners coming together or breaking apart, this is a book for people who have ever loved a friend who was sick, grieving, or lost, and for people who have ever struggled to seek help or accept it.
Eva Hagberg Fisher is a writer, critic, scholar, and teacher. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Wallpaper, Wired, Architect, Dwell, among many other outlets. She is the author of It’s All In Your Head, a best-selling Kindle Single that was selected as one of the Best of the Year, two well-received books about architecture, and collaborations with design curator Paola Antonelli and the prestigious architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill on their books. Her improbable love story was featured as a Vows column in the New York Times. With a diagnosis and a long life ahead of her, she is a lecturer and PhD candidate at University of California - Berkeley.
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Published 2019-02-01 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
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Book
Published 2019-02-01 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |