What Does It Feel Like? by Sophie Kinsella

I am not one to read a lot of Sophie Kinsella, seeing as her genre is one that I do not read extensively in, but this was on the 2024 NYT Notable Book list, and I do make my way through about half of those over the course of the ensuing year, and it was available on Libby just as I was loading up my Kindle for a long trip where I would take no physical books--well, knock me over with a feather, this not what I expected. The author herself was diagnosed with a glioblastoma, which is an aggressive and uniformly fatal brain tumor, and so does her main character. Also like the author, Eve is a successful author with a lovely husband and five children, and so the story is parallel to the one that Ms. Kinsella is herself living. On the plus side, she does address some of the things that one needs to grapple with in this situation, and she also avoids quite a lot about it at the same time. There is a fair amount of humor and good spirits--which I 100% agree is the only way to go, otherwise you already have one foot in the grave, but there was a lot missing, at least to my ear. I get it, this is a personal story and it is hard to face, even when you have an avatar in the form of a book character through which to filter your hopes and fears, but speaking as someone who received what is usually a uniformly fatal cancer diagnosis 9 years ago, there was a lot more to it than is here, and I would have liked it to go a bit deeper. But it didn't and despite that, it is worth a read