Frost Will Come

<p>When her octogenarian poet mother was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, Mary Cappello and her wife moved into the living room of Rosemary's one-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia to help fulfill her wish to live out her life at home. A memoir in the form of lyric essays—with her mother's own writing interspersed—<i>Frost Will Come</i> is a daughter's tribute to her mother's months-long transition from a deeply lived life to a difficult, beautiful, and uneasy death.</p> <p>In the tradition of Annie Ernaux's <i>I Remain in Darkness</i> and Simone de Beauvoir's <i>A Very Easy Death</i>, Cappello renders an immersive and emotionally honest portrait of modern caregiving in a prose style that is the very definition of candor: spontaneous, fresh, unadorned, frank, and open. While paying homage to expert caregivers and medical professionals, Cappello also brings her signature razor-sharp analysis to all the things that fall outside the realm of (medical) knowledge—from platitudes around the time death takes to the defiance of a "peaceful death" as a sign of a moral failing.</p> <p><i>Frost Will Come</i> is much more than a memoir of grief. It is a rare reckoning with the very fundamentals of existence: how we come into being, how we care, and how we die.</p>