Writing with a stark, self-questioning tone, author Frank Davey recalls the last year of his wife Linda’s battle with an inoperable brain tumor. Through Davey’s detailed daily journal entries, this book provides a sober, uncompromisingly direct account of a family’s struggle to help make their loved one’s time more comfortable. Composed of moments in which ugliness and tenderness intertwine, it shows how the devastation extends to the family, making them question their own memories as they watch a once-vital woman unravel. Davey describes the demons of a past Linda can no longer share. Davey also comments on the frustrations of dealing with today’s underfunded and disorganized health care and presents the struggle to maintain dignity in the face of a graceless medical system.

Born in Vancouver, Frank Davey was Carl F. Klinck Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario. Upon his retirement in 2005, the conference “Poetics and Public Culture in Canada” was held in his honour. Davey attended the University of British Columbia where he was a co-founder of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. Since 1963, he has been the editor-publisher of the poetics journal Open Letter. With fellow TISH poet Fred Wah, Davey founded the world’s first on-line literary magazine, SwiftCurrent in 1984.

A prolific and highly-esteemed author of numerous books and scholarly articles on Canadian literary criticism and poetry, Davey writes with a unique panache as he examines with humour and irony the ambiguous play of signs in contemporary culture, the popular stories that lie behind it, and the struggles between different identity-based groups in our globalizing society—racial, regional, gender-based, ethnic, economic—that drive this play.

Frank Davey's profile page