Rachel Khong

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

Goodbye, Vitamin

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.

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 

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

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

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.

Goodbye, Vitamin quotes

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