Goodbye, Vitamin - Hardcover

An Amazon Best Book of July 2017: Goodbye, Vitamin is a generous and funny novel about love, family, and finding your way. After her father’s Alzheimer’s disease progresses, 30-year old Ruth pulls up stakes and moves home temporarily to help care for him. The timing is fortuitous given that Ruth’s own life has recently gone sideways with a broken engagement and the realization that her life at 30 is not what she’d envisioned. What struck me most about this novel is the influence of memories. How much we depend on them to remind us who we are, where we've been, and all the emotions attached to them. Memories can betray us--when we’re in love we hold snapshots of special moments close, but when our heart is broken all we want is to push them away. Yet there they remain. And within a family, each person's recollection of pivotal moments shapes the dynamic of the whole. Author Rachel Khong finds the humor in painful moments without diluting their importance and brings insight into the absurdity of trying to find balance when even our own minds may send us spinning in circles. Goodbye, Vitamin is a book I truly enjoyed cover-to-cover; it gave me the chance to laugh--a lot--and also see a few things in my own life from a different perspective. Because at the end of the day, as Ruth puts says in the book, “It doesn’t matter who remembers what, I guess, so long as somebody remembers something.”--Seira Wilson

Rachel Khong grew up in Southern California, and holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Florida. From 2011 to 2016, she was the managing editor then executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland, American Short Fiction, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, and California Sunday. She lives in San Francisco. Goodbye, Vitamin is her first novel.