Genre - Contemporary Fiction

Narrator - Jane Oppenheimer

I do - want impossible things that is, so this title was very intriguing. True confession, I chose Catherine Newman’s We All Want Impossible Things blindly among the audiobooks available in my Libby collection. The book gods smiled on me. Edi is dying: she is, in fact, ready for hospice care. Her best friend Ash will be by her side. Edi says goodbye to her 12 year son and moves into a facility close to Ash’s home. The 2 weeks she is given stretches to more and through that we get to relive their friendship and memories with them. We live the pain and sometimes grossness of her disease. This book gives a beautiful friendship and a testament to life and loss.

Edi and Ash have the kind of friendship to which I aspire. They have been friends since childhood - with each other for all of the important moments. Newman’s writing is lyrical. I’d love to share with you some of my favorite bits of figurative language, but I was listening to an audiobook, and didn’t get them highlighted. One that stuck with me was near the end, when she noted how death - such a big moment is nothing compared to a future of trying to live without your best friends; she compared it to birth which can eclipse an entire future of parenthood. We do the same, I think, with marriages, graduations, and a fair amount of big life events. She captures it beautifully. Often, I was just stopped short with the loveliness of Newman’s language. Even the ugliest moments of Edi’s illness and death are rendered expertly through her words. Jane Oppenheimer delivers these words with the perfect balance of humor and grief. And there are moments of humor. Life is funny, even in the darkest times, and Newman illustrates this very well.

I guess what I love about this book is that even through the profound sadness, Newman leaves her readers with hope. I don’t have any wisdom about death - in terms of accepting it. I mean I know it’s inevitable. I’ve experienced grief and had my world completely changed through death. I’d give a great deal to undo some of that. What happens in We All Want Impossible Things gives me hope for sustainable friendships that will see me through the darkest times in life - even death.