Reading Journal: Goodbye Vitamin

Goodbye Vitamin: A Novel by Rachel Khong.

As generation X, which I am a part of, gets older, we are given a new title:  Some of us are now renamed the Sandwich Generation because we are caught between two tasks; caring for our own children as we juggle to care for our parents.  The question is always: how can I continue taking care of this Benjamin Button-like creature, while hustling to research middle school applications at the same time? The vitamin at the title of this book we say goodbye to, is going down the hatch…hoping it will keep memory loss at bay. 

Rachel Khong's book is structured in the form of a journal of sorts.  It lays out one year in the life of Ruth, (starting on December 26^th) the protagonist marking her days, starting with the moment her father’s pants are found in a tree.  He is beginning to lose his memory, and thus Ruth moves back home to her childhood home to help out.  The prognosis points to Alzheimer’s.  In her journal, there are flashbacks to her (delusional) happy life with an ex-boyfriend.  There are journal entries written by the father, about Ruth as a child; precocious and adorable like:

Today when you lost a tooth, you cried that you looked like a pumpkin. When I told you to behave, you said “I am being HAVE!”

This story takes a big problem happening in one family’s life and breaks it down into small obstacles.  Their problem is not historic, it does not span a large swath of time.  It is written from the personal, the interior and very much alone. 

This is Rachel Khong’s first novel. It got rave reviews.  It’s good but, it’s no White Teeth by Zadie Smith; though there were some funny bits, like thoughtfully funny, introspectively funny.

The narrative slowly unfolds hidden in a collection of random facts and trivia.

It poses the question: what happens when we become our parent’s parent?  When our parents become children? And halfway into Ruth’s year at home, June 11^th to be exact, the role reversal becomes obvious, and Ruth begins to mimic the journal entries of her father.  Anecdotes are cute when describing the behavior of a toddler, but when those same stories depict one's own parent’s actions, it is heartbreaking.

Off to re-read White Teeth next.