Ruth Young is in a difficult place. In Goodbye, Vitamin, by Rachel Khong, fresh from the breakup of her marriage, Ruth moves back home to help her mother take care of her father as he slowly succumbs to Alzheimer’s. She worries all the time that she’s not unselfish enough to take care of her father, that she’s not doing enough to keep him healthy, that she didn’t do enough to keep her marriage together, and that perhaps she too is losing her grip on reality. This is a sad book, but it becomes strangely hopeful over time as both Ruth and her father, Howard, learn to enjoy the moments as they come.
Written as a diary, Goodbye, Vitamin covers a little more than a year of Ruth and Howard’s life. Ruth leaves her home (which is no longer really a home) in San Francisco, to move in with her parents in Los Angeles. She’s very much at loose ends in the aftermath of her marriage to her cheating husband. It’s clear she still loves him and that she needs something to do other than fret about him. So, as much as she can, she throws herself into taking care of Howard—that is, as much as he will let her.
As one might expect in a novel that centers on Alzheimer’s, memory plays a big part in Ruth and Howard’s lives. Ruth’s memories of her childhood are rosy colored, in contrast to her brothers. Her father wrote down little glimpses of Ruth’s contrary and yet highly logical way of looking at the world. Unfortunately, the longer Ruth lives with her parents, the more she realizes that she overlooked a lot of her father’s bad behavior. Meanwhile, as Howard’s memory goes, he becomes more like his daughter when she was a child. They share a similar quirky worldview.
I suspect that Goodbye, Vitamin is going to make a lot of readers ugly cry. It hits right at the heart of the confusion, anxiety, and emotional burdens that arise when children take on caring for their parents. The reversal of children taking care of parents is difficult, especially for Ruth who only had to keep an eye out for herself until she moved back in with her parents and doesn’t feel especially competent at even that much. But the way that Goodbye, Vitamin shows her growth as a person who can finally let go of worrying about what might go wrong to enjoy the moment.
Goodbye, Vitamin is one of the most graceful books I’ve read. It is incredibly deft in the way it plays on our heartstrings as Ruth grows as a person and loses some of her innocence in regards to her very human father. What I like most about this book is the way that life lessons are folded into the book’s subtext; it does not beat its readers over the head with morals. I frequently laughed at the absurdities of life in the Young household, often enough that I managed to avoid the almost unavoidable ugly crying this book might have elicited.
Note for bibliotherapeutic use: Recommended for children who find themselves in the position of taking care of their ailing parents.