Last Things

May 15, 2017
Deeply affecting and harrowing, Moss’s narrative of her husband’s struggle with Lou Gehrig’s disease begins with Harvey feeling a little out of breath while walking with his wife and sons in Rome, then races through a description of his awful deterioration over the next seven months. An uninformed or uncaring medical establishment doesn’t know how to help Harvey cope, leaving his wife to assimilate the physical and emotional changes in their lives. This is not a sentimental story of how suffering ennobles people. Harvey shuts off human contact, desperate to finish the art history research that has been his life’s work; Moss is distracted, clinging to her own sanity but horrified to realize how their mutual trust and tenderness are disappearing bit by bit. Moss’s deliberately naive drawings effectively accompany her painfully direct text. The fact that the family does endure is impressive, and this book demonstrates how art can transmute suffering into literature.

April 1, 2017

Moss ("Amelia's Notebook" series) and her children are in Rome with her husband, medievalist-on-sabbatical Harvey Stahl, when Harvey begins to tire easily. Back home in Berkeley, CA, he starts a frustrating regimen of medical tests, ending after two months in diagnosis: ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), or Lou Gehrig's disease. Only seven months later, Harvey is dead at age 61. Moss had expected that she and Harvey might grow closer in fighting the illness together. But her formerly warm, loving husband retreats into hostile denial. Feeling distraught and emotionally abandoned, she must cater to his escalating medical needs as well as keep the lives of their three boys relatively normal. Moss uses simple line drawings with ink-washed grays for this poignant account. She reveals medical and social details that do not typically appear in patient information materials or in the press, from diagrams of Harvey's breathing equipment to frank descriptions of patient denial and stigma. VERDICT Perhaps the first graphic memoir about a spouse's death, this personal human drama touches on experiences that everyone has sooner or later. An eye-opener for adults and teens concerned about health care.--MC

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2018

This graphic novel follows one family's struggle with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. Harvey, a university professor, enjoys traveling and has a loving wife and three sons. He typically takes charge of things at home, but when he is diagnosed with ALS, life changes dramatically for everyone. Though the story is told from the point of view of Harvey's wife (Moss), who becomes his primary caretaker while juggling work and childcare, readers gain tremendous insight into how everyone, including extended family members, deals with the diagnosis. Moss's illustrations convey the intensity of the decisions and occurrences, painting a picture of this trauma that words alone cannot. Additional graphics, such as charts and lists, shed light on the reality of life with ALS. VERDICT A valuable offering for anyone preparing for or coping with the loss of a family member to disease.-April Sanders, Spring Hill College, Mobile, AL

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2017
A graphic memoir by an author best known for her children's books details the devastating effects of her husband's amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on her entire family.Though Moss has sold millions of books--particularly the Amelia's Notebook series--she explains in the acknowledgments that "this book wasn't easy to sell. Many agents and editors felt it was too dark or sad." It is both of those, as the author subverts the stereotype of the noble caregiver and the patient whose fatal illness teaches everyone about the true meaning of life. Moss offers no cliched heroism. "We're told that major illness deepens us, makes us grateful for our lives," she writes. "But for me, ALS doesn't work that way. I'm not a bigger, nobler person and neither is [my husband] Harvey." When Harvey received his diagnosis and quickly saw his health decline, he seemed to resent his wife's attempts to help him or be closer to him. And she resented him back, not only for the impositions his illness made on her and his lack of appreciation, but for the way it altered the dynamic of the entire family. "But it's not his disease," she maintains, after he decreed that he would notify their children. "It's rotting away at all of us," writes Moss. "First it killed our marriage. Now it's destroying our family. And then Harvey will die. What will be left of us?" Instead of the concern for Harvey that one would expect as a focus, the author is brutally honest about how hard she took his illness and how it affected her. There are brief flashes of a return of intimacy and connection between them--and sessions with a therapist provided some perspective--but it seems that only after his death could she truly reconnect with the husband she loved.When Moss writes, "this isn't how it's supposed to be," other readers who aren't feeling what they're supposed to be feeling could well find comfort in a kindred spirit.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 15, 2017
Moss, famous for the children's series, Amelia's Notebook, here turns to decidedly adult matters. Readers are invited into her home during one of the most intimate and turbulent times in her family's history, her husband's quick decline and untimely death from ALS. As Harvey starts fading, Moss rises to the occasion of becoming his caretaker, a single parent, and a patient advocate battling insurance and medical equipment companies. She is honest about her failures and shortcomings in each role and candid about the horrors of losing her partner to such a visceral decay. Her signature, playful artistic style offers a much-needed dose of hopefulness when presenting images of sterile hospital recovery rooms and pictures of Harvey breathing through a ventilator plugged into the wall of a gas station after the car battery dies on a long drive home. Moss fully exposes herself as a selfish, sentimental, and wildly resilient human being. The confessional, warts-and-all honesty of Moss' heartbreaking story gives an empowering glimpse into the realities of unexpected loss.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)