A young woman returns home to care for her failing father in this funny and inescapably touching debut, from a wonderfully original new literary voice.
One morning, the citizens of a small L.A. suburb awake to find pairs of a man’s pants hanging from the trees. The pants belong to Howard Young, a prominent history professor, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Howard’s wife, Annie, summons their daughter, Ruth. Freshly disengaged from her fiancé and feeling that life has not turned out quite the way she planned, thirty-year-old Ruth quits her job and arrives home to find the situation worse than she’d realized. Her father is erratically lucid, her mother lucidly erratic. But as Howard’s condition intensifies, the comedy in Ruth’s situation takes hold, gently transforming her grief.
Told in captivating glimpses and drawn from a deep well of insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Goodbye, Vitamin pilots through the loss, love, and absurdity of finding one’s footing in this life.