Frost Will Come by Mary Cappello

Frost Will Come by Mary Cappello

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—Frost Will Come is a daughter's tribute to her mother's months-long transition from a deeply lived life to a difficult, beautiful, and uneasy death.

In the tradition of Annie Ernaux's I Remain in Darkness and Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death, 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.

Frost Will Come 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.

Mary Cappello is the author of seven books, including the best-selling essay collection Awkward: A Detour. She is a professor emerita of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island.