Book Review: Intervals, by Marianne Brooker

Intervals

Marianne Brooker

Fitzcarraldo, September 24, 2024

It was a weird summer for me, and I’ve heard other people had an off summer too. Not a tragic summer, but not a great one either. So I thought I’d aim to lighten things up around here, make this newsletter an easier lift.

Then I checked the spreadsheet I keep to see which book on my review list was being published next, and, well, light it is not. But it is wonderful and well-considered.

Intervals is a collection of essays by Marianne Brooker in which she explores the personal, interpersonal, medical, ethical, religious, and societal implications of her mother’s choosing to die by refusing to eat and drink.

Brooker’s mother was diagnosed some years ago with primary progressive multiple sclerosis, and before she turns fifty, the disease has become unbearable. In 2019, she makes a decision for herself, and she makes it clear: she will voluntarily stop eating and drinking (VSED), which will enable her to die in her own home. This choice is legal in the UK, where Booker and her mother live, but it occupies a gray area in almost every dimension Booker considers, from the spiritual to the bureaucratic.

Brooker has a PhD in literature, and these essays weave in literary quotations to shine a wider light on the narrow personal experience she’s presenting. As I read, I began to wonder if these quotations were intended to act as a device to distance the author and reader from the difficult process of sitting with Brooker’s mother as she slowly ends her life, or if they were meant to shore up Brooker’s excellent arguments about the challenge of living and dying as a poor person with few healthcare options available both during life and at its end. Brooker seemed to be finding comfort in knowing that others have dealt with similar struggles and written eloquently about them, as she herself does. There’s a solidarity to be found in literature that spans time and space.

I need not have wondered if I was reading this correctly, since Brooker writes of Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts:

Perhaps books like this enact their own quiet form of assistance; they’re rallied around me like shields, windows, and crutches.

She uses these works to pull herself back from experiencing pain, grief, and intimacy. Reaching into literature gives her self and her essays breathing room and perspective.

Brooker has an extraordinary ability to write a book that is very close to the bone without oversharing or revealing too much. Her mother wanted to die with her selfhood intact (Booker is not the biggest fan of the “death with dignity” phrasing, rightly wondering who is allowed to die with dignity), and Brooker maintains a level of her mother’s privacy while allowing the reader into the front room where the hospital bed rests. She writes that she held her mother’s hands and spoke to her just after she died, but she does not write what she said, keeping those final words for herself.

She also mentions at the end of the book people who chose not to be part of this literary project but who were very much a part of her mother’s life and death. The result could feel claustrophobic, like a binary star system trapped in an apartment, but it doesn’t. The caregivers and doctors, the friends and family, remain nameless, but they populate the essays in a way that respects their wishes to not be portrayed. It is a feat to write a memoir this closely observed while allowing immediate family to remain outside its covers.

The essays tackle far more than one woman’s illness, though it is this illness that provides Brooker with the basis for her intellectual queries. She tackles systemic issues in healthcare, including class expectations, the restriction of choice due to poverty, the patchwork of care made up of family and professional caregivers, the power of doctors and insurers over medical decisions, and both the solid weave and gaping holes in the safety nets provided by governments and communities. This one woman’s death provides a lens for examining many aspects of twenty-first century healthcare challenges in the global north.

The collection manages to be both a balm for people who find themselves navigating these systems and a call to action for those who are tired of butting heads with the anonymous systems holding our health hostage to their profits and bureaucracy. It’s sharply intelligent and deeply caring.

You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.