It’s difficult to write about dementia without being depressing.
Dementia pulls at the very fabric of what holds us together. It makes strangers of family and friends. It rips lifetimes away in stealth, reversing the passage of time. How deeply sad it is to experience this kind of loss—the disappearance of a life while still living it. The sadness, which may have different tones, seems remarkably uncomplicated.
So the task for any fiction writer working on a book about dementia is to find something else among sadness and grief—logic, or lesson, or humor, or even a little joy. December’s California Book Club author, Rachel Khong, accomplishes this discovery masterfully.
Goodbye, Vitamin is Khong’s first novel, a slim and diaristic work of fiction, published in 2017, when she was in her early 30s. In it, Ruth—30 years old and newly single after her fiancé leaves her for another woman—moves from her empty Bernal Heights apartment in San Francisco to her parents’ home in Los Angeles. It’s Christmas Eve and her life is unraveling: her father has been experiencing bouts of memory loss that have evolved into fatigue and clumsiness and look like Alzheimer’s. The diagnosis, as he tells it, is that he is “straight-up demented.” Her mother asks her to stay awhile.
The novel chronicles a year of Ruth’s life, as her father, a former history professor, devolves, first day by day and then over months, his cognitive disintegration affecting how the passage of time is presented. In an effort to preserve his pride, Ruth sets up a mock class for him to teach at the local university featuring his past students. She struggles to negotiate their shifting roles from parent and child to caregiver and the cared for. And she tries to reconcile his failings as a father—his drinking and his philandering among them—with the moments where his love for her, as his daughter, cuts through the dementia and betrayal. “What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers,” Ruth thinks.
The clearest example of this: Throughout the year, Ruth’s father finds pieces of writing from the journals he kept in her first years of life, which he shows her (or leaves for her to find). These pages include passages like, “Today you asked about storms, and their eyes,” and “Today you had me excavate your nose, which you’d put corn into,” and “Today you were so readily impressed by me.” Part of the novel’s artistry is that by the end, Ruth’s reflections on her father match the same format. “Today I found an avocado skin on the dish rack, like a drying dish,” she reflects. “Today I gave you my old seashell collection.” The beauty—and the heart—is in the details, the moments.
Tear out a page from this book and it would look the same as the pages Ruth’s father gives her.
Khong is now the author of a cookbook and two novels, including this year’s Real Americans. In reviewing it for Alta, critic Ilana Masad wrote, “Whereas Khong’s first novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, was slim and focused on a single point of view, Real Americans is sprawling, employing three narrators and spanning decades.” But when it comes to writing family and interconnectedness, Goodbye, Vitamin is what first proved Khong’s talent. The book won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist for First Fiction.
In 2022, the California Book Club read Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers, another slim novel about dementia. The main character, Alice, begins at a swimming pool and ends at a care facility. “Little by little, she is beginning to disappear,” Otsuka writes. Goodbye, Vitamin is an antidote to that disappearance, treasuring the mundane, full of detail. The CBC often features books that deepen readers’ understandings of how we relate to one another. Here, Khong’s novel illuminates how we learn to grow and forgive—and how we can choose to remember one another, even as we’re forgetting.•
Join us on December 12 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Khong will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Mimi Lok to discuss Goodbye, Vitamin. Please note that this event is on the second Thursday of the month. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
“GOODBYE, VITAMIN” EXCERPT
Read the opening pages of Khong’s novel to whet your appetite for the whole thing. —Alta
GARY PHILLIPS EVENT RECAP
If you missed last Thursday’s November conversation about Violent Spring on Zoom, read the recap or watch the video. —Alta
SACRED STREETS
Poet Mike Sonksen writes about South Central Los Angeles. —Alta
PACIFIC NORTHWEST THRILLER
Alta books editor David L. Ulin reviews John Straley’s “thought-provoking” Big Breath In, featuring a retired marine biologist turned detective investigating baby harvesting in a near–present day reality where abortion has been banned. —Alta
NEW CHICANO LITERATURE
Join Alta Live next Wednesday, December 4, to hear author Dagoberto Gilb discuss his short story collection New Testaments with Alta editorial director Blaise Zerega. —Alta
TV FOR THE LONG WEEKEND
Binge-watch prior CBC author Charles Yu’s streaming TV adaptation of his Interior Chinatown. (And read Alta contributor Chris Vognar’s take for the New York Times.) —Hulu
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