Name: Alexandra Sklar's review of Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong
Item: Goodbye, Vitamin
Rating: 4
Author: Alexandra Sklar

Rachel Khong

Hello, ageing parents. Hello, dementia. Goodbye, vitamin... 'Khong is a magician... Brilliant' Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies 'Khong's first novel sneaks up on you - just like life, illness and heartbreak. And love. A million small, human and often deeply funny details gather force to tell a tale that is ultimately, incredibly poignant' Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man Ruth is thirty and her life is falling apart: she and her fianc� are moving house, but he's moving out to live with another woman; her career is going nowhere; and then she learns that her father, a history professor beloved by his students, has Alzheimer's. At Christmas, her mother begs her to stay on and help. For a year. Goodbye, Vitamin is the wry, beautifully observed story of a woman at a crossroads, as Ruth and her friends attempt to shore up her father's career; she and her mother obsess over the ambiguous health benefits - in the absence of a cure - of dried jellyfish supplements and vitamin pills; and they all try to forge a new relationship with the brilliant, childlike, irascible, sweet old man her father has become. 'Half stand-up comic, half seismographer of the human heart ... Khong writes with a gentle humour that moves you not only to care for her characters, but also to care more fervently for the people in your life' Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine 'One of the funniest elegiac novels I have ever read' David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language of Cranes

Goodbye, Vitamin

What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers. That the reasons we can care for one another can have nothing to do with the person cared for. That it has only to do with who 

 were around that person-what we felt about that person.

Here's the fear: she gave to us, and we took from her, until she disappeared.

 harm that's already done, I know. But what if it could halt the decline?

At some point we fall asleep, the both of us, children nestled among the laundry.

In one of Mom's magazines, there is an article about how to keep your man.

I catch a glimpse in the window's reflection and surprise 

I've never liked New Year's. The trouble with beginnings is that there's no such thing. What's a beginning but an arbitrary point of entry? You begin when you're born, I guess, but it's not like you know anything about that.

Alexandra Sklar

An O: the Oprah Magazine and Amazon.com Best Book of 2017 'Khong is a magician ... Brilliant' Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies ‘Khong’s first novel sneaks up on you – just like life, illness and heartbreak. And love. A million small, human and often deeply funny details gather force to tell a tale that is ultimately, incredibly poignant’ Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man Ruth is thirty and her life is falling apart: she and her fiancé are moving house, but he's moving out to live with another woman; her career is going nowhere; and then she learns that her father, a history professor beloved by his students, has Alzheimer’s. At Christmas, her mother begs her to stay on and help. For a year. Goodbye, Vitamin is the wry, beautifully observed story of a woman at a crossroads, as Ruth and her friends attempt to shore up her father’s career; she and her mother obsess over the ambiguous health benefits – in the absence of a cure – of dried jellyfish supplements and vitamin pills; and they all try to forge a new relationship with the brilliant, childlike, irascible man her father has become. 'A beautifully written debut, dreamy and funny ... flawless' Independent ?'Biting, funny and poignant and makes you wish you’d thought of writing it first' Stylist, '50 Unmissable Books' 'Like a chain of fairy lights in the darkness' Financial Times 'One of the funniest elegiac novels I have ever read' David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language of Cranes

Eva Ströberg

Goodbye, Vitamin - Rachel Khong
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⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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This book deals with unpleasant subject in a beautiful way. I like the way the character developed and interacted with each other. The dialogues were beautiful and profound and I found myself thinking about them long after I turned the “pages”
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Ruth, who recently broke up with his fiancé Joel, moved back to her parents house after her mother’s request. Her father, who is a history teacher in a local college, is suffering from Alzheimer, making him leaving his clothings on the trees, eating mouldy bread or peeling bunch bananas without eating them. He is also a recurring drunk and a cheater. He’s been having affairs with his colleague and now a former student
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Ruth, unlike her younger brother Linus who has witnessed all their father’s antics and cheatings, is treating her father with kindness, and patience even, even with her mom is just want to getting away from everything
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Alzheimer and parental care are always sensitive topics, especially among Asian families, where the kids are almost always expected to drop everything in their hands to take care of their ailing parents. It’s never easy. 
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Deepika Ramesh

I LOVE THIS BOOK. Imagine that I went to the rooftop and said that. I LOVE THIS BOOK.

I tried hard to not become a stalker, because I am ridiculously in love with Rachel Khong’s writing. I wanted to read everything that the woman has ever written.

As I write this I think about what I am often told, that it’s easy to trash what I loathe, but it’s sometimes hard to find the right words to argue why I love something. Goodbye, Vitamin belongs to the second category.

Ruth is home after so many years, to care for her father who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. No. Please don’t stop reading. It’s not about how the family copes with the loss as Ruth’s father loses his memories. No. It’s about how they confront their demons, learn to love each other unconditionally, AND make memories. Yes. That’s the thing. It’s not about letting go of precious memories, but about making more and keeping the love-tank full without agonising about what’s lost. I love that idea. It’s comforting to slip into nostalgia, but it’s done at the rate of neglecting the present. So why can’t we channelise our precious energy into making this moment memorable! Rachel Khong brings that thought home without being preachy.

Our heroine’s voice is a melange of child-like curiosity, warmth, kindness, vulnerability, and love. I adore every character that Rachel Khong has produced. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that such people exist. But I choose to suspend my disbelief.

What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers. That the reasons we can care for one another can have nothing to do with the person cared for. That it has only to do with who we were around that person — what we felt about that person.
It didn’t matter what you remembered or didn’t, and the remembering — it occurred to me — was irrelevant. All that mattered was that the day was nice — was what it was.

azliana aziz

Khong's astute observation of minute details and spinning all those trivialities to a sometimes funny, sometimes sad and absolutely poignant prose is something special.

Meghan Navoy

I liked it just alright, I never really got into it. But it was an enjoyable read overall.

The topic was a really beautiful journey of a daughter and her father coping with Alzheimer's and the changing nature of relationships.

Sarai Johnson

Fun but not fluffy. Serious but not too serious.

Jenna

This book follows Ruth who moves back in with her parents after a breakup, after her dad is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It's definitely my type of book - contemporary, main character in her late 20s, quirky humor, etc etc... and I liked it. However, something just felt lacking. I think... it could have been longer? There were moments when I wanted more detail - like about Joel (the ex), about her brother, about how they were feeling. Basically having those side characters more fleshed out.

I did really like the diary-style, especially towards the end. I did find Ruth's relationship with her dad heartwarming, too. I especially loved the diary entries from her dad from when Ruth was growing up.

Even though this book didn't become an absolute favorite of mine, I'd still really recommend it because I feel like the humor and style would really work for a lot of readers. Goodbye, Vitamin is a quick, witty but still sweet book.

Not to be judgmental at all. I’m just astonished that there are people that didn’t like this book

jiaqi kang

Jennifer Dieter

I had the pleasure of seeing Rachel Khong in person when Minneapolis was her second stop on her very first book tour. I was incredibly excited to read her book given how charming and funny she was in person. And her book is charming and funny at times, but I'm just finding the novel in diary format difficult to enjoy. It always feels like a slough to me, and I never really get in a groove when it comes to caring about the characters. Khong is certainly a good writer with many good ideas, it's just not a writing style I personally dig.

Leafling

Goodbye, Vitamin is such a sweet book, I truly don't even know where to begin. It is a thing that I love: a quirky, contemporary, stream-of-consciousness first person narrative, which generally are a little less than hopeful. So this is truly refreshing. Hopeful isn't really the word I mean, because this book is only realistic and completely grounded. I feel like the word hopeful implies an intentionally "feel good" book, which this isn't. My friend, Annie, put it well: it's kind. This is a book written in diary entries from the perspective of an untethered thirty-year-old woman, Ruth, who just went through a break up and had to move home to take care of her father with Alzheimer's. She is forced into navigating her relationship with her rapidly changing father, as well as navigating her father and her mother's relationship, which she is forced to come to terms with. It is a fun read, often funny, and very honest. Parts might make you cry, but it is never manipulative despite having ample opportunity to be considering the subject manner.


The little snippets of days that we see beautifully illustrate the daily struggles of caring for somebody in declining mental faculties, as well as the small things that make a day bright. In tandem with Ruth's diary entries, every once in a while we get to see a journal that her father used to keep filled with things Ruth would say and do as a child. These definitely got me the most, because even when taking care of her father was getting tough, the snippets of his journal so viscerally overflowed with love for his daughter. On a very personal note, I can't remember what specifically, but something in these journals made me think of how my grandpa would sing "You Are My Sunshine" to me and how loved I feel even now just reminiscing on those moments. Grandpa, you have all of your mental faculties, but I don't know if you remember that because you haven't sang to me in a while (rude). But thank you for emailing me your personal responses to all of my blog posts (I save them all), and I look forward to hearing your thoughts about this one. I love you! If you want to borrow this book, I don't have a copy - sorry!

Full Review (with update on my grandpa's response): Outlandish Lit :: Two Very Different Books You Can Read In One Day

Grace M

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR; O, The Oprah Magazine; Vogue; San Francisco Chronicle; Esquire; Huffington Post; Nylon; Entertainment Weekly; BuzzFeed; Booklist; and The Independent "A quietly brilliant disquisition . . . told in prose that is so startling in its spare beauty that I found myself thinking about Khong's turns of phrase for days after I finished reading."—Doree Shafrir, The New York Times Book Review "One of those rare books that is both devastating and light-hearted, heartfelt, and joyful. . . . Don't miss it."—BuzzFeed “Hello, Rachel Khong. Kudos for this delectable take on familial devotion.”—NPR Her life at a crossroads, a young woman goes home again in this funny and inescapably moving debut from a wonderfully original new literary voice. 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, leaves town and arrives at her parents’ home to find that situation more complicated than she'd realized. Her father, a prominent history professor, is losing his memory and is only erratically lucid. Ruth’s mother, meanwhile, is lucidly erratic. But as Ruth's father’s condition intensifies, the comedy in her situation takes hold, gently transforming all 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.

A Novel

Erin Goss

Amelia

Kaelan Chambers

Neta Harris

Erin G.

Noha Zainal

Heather Margaret

Gigi V

""Incredibly poignant . . . Rachel Khong's first novel sneaks up on you -- just like life . . . and heartbreak. And love."--Miranda July A few days after Christmas in a small suburb outside of L.A., pairs of a man's pants hang 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 fiance and still broken up about it, feeling that life has not turned out quite the way she planned, thirty-year- old Ruth quits her job, and arrives home to find her parents' situation worse than she'd realized. Her father is erratically lucid and her mother, a devoted and creative cook, sees the sources of memory loss in every pot and pan. But as Howard's condition intensifies, the comedy in Ruth's situation takes hold, gently transforming her grief. She throws herself into caretaking: cooking dementia-fighting meals (a feast of jellyfish!), researching supplements, anything to reignite her father's once-notable memory. And when the university finally lets Howard go, Ruth and one of her father's handsome former students take their efforts to help Howard one step too far. 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 a one's footing in this life"--

Alexandra Sklar &
Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong

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Alexandra Sklar &Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong

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Alexandra Sklar &
Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong