Connect
Sponsors
Currently Reading
-
Terms
The Book Lady's Blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviews and articles posted here are property of The Book Lady's Blog and are not to be posted elsewhere without permission. Please contact me if you wish to post any of my work, or any excerpt thereof, in any other location or format.
Miscellaneous
Meet Bookrageous!
Technical Stuff
Design Credits
May
05
Book Review: Life’s That Way by Jim Beaver
2009 at 10am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Recently published April 16, 2009 by Amy Einhorn Books (a division of Penguin)
When Jim Beaver’s wife Cecily was diagnosed with lung cancer in October 2003, he quickly discovered that keeping all of their friends and family up-to-date by phone was an impossibility. So he began sending nightly emails chronicling Cecily’s fight against cancer and his own struggle to deal with her illness, face the painful possibilities, and continue parenting their two-year-old daughter Maddie, who had recently been diagnosed as autistic. Life’s That Way presents Beaver’s nightly emails and allows readers to experience the journey with him.
This is not a traditional memoir. It is not a reflection or a collection of memories. It is a snapshot of one man’s struggle to make sense of “the transforming experience of [his] life” as he lived it, one day at a time. Beaver’s nightly emails bring us into his heart and mind and give us a rare glimpse of raw emotion laid bare as he reaches out to the people who love him and Cecily for support and strength. His remarkable ability to give voice to painful, intimate thoughts and terrifying worries are what make these emails special and worth sharing, and they are the reason that his original list of 100 recipients grew to over 4,000 during his year of nightly dispatches.
Beaver writes often of his love for Cecily, of the blessings and difficulties of marriage, and of the conflicting feelings that make this battle so painful.
I am so in love with this girl, so intricately interwoven with her, that I want to scream whenever the prospect of losing her pushes up throught one of the grates of the dungeon of my mind where I keep such thoughts. It seems a betrayal to even mention that I’m scared to death of losing her, when she needs so very much to know that I believe to the utmost in her survival.
As he runs through the entire spectrum of human emotion, Beaver marvels at the fact that, at any given time, millions of people are going through exactly what he and his family are experiencing, yet it is very rarely discussed. We will all, at some point, know someone who goes through this, or we will go through it ourselves, but none of us knows how to talk about it, and none of us knows what to expect. By sharing his thoughts in his nightly emails and now, by sharing them with Life’s That Way, Beaver invites into his dialogue in hopes that it will shed light on a unspoken experience and provide encouragement to others to do the same. And he knows it is not easy.
What’s the point in having truth if you’re not going to tell it? But, of course, even now I leave out truths, because some are too painful to tell, some are too painful to hear, and some are too painful to acknowledge.
He writes with unflinching honesty about his fears, worries, hopes, and dreams, and he reveals the unexpected blessings and overwhelming support he received when he reached out and opened himself up to share his most private thoughts.
I was aware that some phenomenon was occurring with the journal, that something about the way I opened up myself and our lives and invited people to take the intimate journey with us had registered with many souls. I also discovered an amazing gift—the astonishing healing power of the written word, for myself and for others.
When Beaver continues the emails after Cecily’s death, Life’s That Way becomes not just a chronicle of illness and struggle but “a lesson in how to grieve and still reach out for life” that we learn alongside Beaver as he works to make sense of his “unrelenting disbelief” and deepest sorrow as he is all the while striving to move forward, to carve out a life for himself and Maddie, to be a good father, to move toward a new life and hold onto the best parts of the old one.
Reading this book is an intensely emotional experience. I felt myself on the verge of tears the entire time, and I cried often. This is the kind of story that you know, when you commit to live your life with someone you love, that you could someday be telling yourself, and it is a difficult but worthwhile read. Because Beaver’s writing has such immediacy and because we do not have 24 hours after each email to prepare for the next one, the emotion can become overwhelming. I never wanted to put this book down, but I could only read 30 or 40 pages at a time.
Life’s That Way is a gift of a book and one that will join Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking as a classic exploration of love and grief. It removes the clinical and focuses on the personal, revealing that “there’s no end to the new ways one can experience such a cataclysm,” and shows that, unbelievable as it is, life does go on. And we go with it.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It will give you pause to reflect on your own relationships and experiences and to think about what your commitments really mean, and it will remind you that even in the worst of situations, people have a wonderful way of reaching out to help and support each other in astonishingly simple and profound ways. 5 out of 5.
Click here to learn more about Life’s That Way.
You might have recognized Beaver’s name—he’s a successful character actor, featured on such shows as Deadwood, Supernatural, and Harper’s Island. His wife Cecily was also an actress and a casting director, and her father, Don Adams, was famous for starring in Get Smart. These are interesting facts, but I didn’t mention them in the body of my review because, really, they are extraneous to the story. Life’s That Way is a book about a man trying to cope with his wife’s illness and death. It doesn’t matter that that man is an actor or that he and his wife had famous friends. The struggle would have been the same if he were a banker or a teacher or a stay-at-home father, and the book is perfectly able to stand on its own.
Special thanks to Kate at Folio Literary Management for sending this unforgettable read my way.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Rebecca Schinsky
No related posts.
I’ll be reading this soon. I’ll be sure to have a box of tissues at my side.
[...] Book Review: Life’s That Way by Jim Beaver [...]
Sounds good, but maybe a little too deep for me right now. Great review!
This sounds like one of those life-changing reads – the kind that makes you look around at your own life and good health ( if you have it) and being profoundly grateful.
I’ll be reading this as soon as I can get my hands on it.
I saw this one mentioned in People when I was flipping through it last night. It sounds wonderful!
My library has this on order and I cannot wait to get a copy of it. It looks amazing. I’ve heard that journalling is one of the most therapeutic ways of dealing with grief, and the nightly emails strike me as being nearly the same – a way of sharing information but also of giving voice to the fears and emotions that the author must have been going through. I know this will be a hard but worthwhile read, and I plan on having lots of Kleenex at the ready.
I have to admit I was one of those that read all the emails as they were sent out originally. I knew who Jim was and I had seen his work. I was a fan of his. As I read this book I found tears rolling down my cheeks as I read each of these emails again. I was sadden by the news of Maddie and that of Cecily. Then the loss of Cecily. I remember when I got that email. I cried and cried…..just as I did in reading it. But the love….WOW!! It’s a love that one dreams about. As I finished the book I realized I had tears but smile. I was happy to know love like that still existed. Now I am a fan of Jim as a Father, a husband and an amazing writer….(of course as an actor.) Thank you for letting us be a part of your life. It is an honor.
Sounds like a great book! I just finished reading another great book that sounds just as touching as “Life’s That Way.” The book is titled, “Cornfield Heiress” by Errollynne Peters. It is also a story about a remarkable woman who lived an extraordinary life and then went through a pretty tough battle with cancer. It really touched me and made me realize how precious life really is. Thanks for sharing this book. I am going to have to read it!
[...] all that craziness last week, I only managed one book review, but man, was the book a great one. Life’s That Way by Jim Beaver will probably be in my favorites of the year and was hands-down the most emotionally [...]
[...] might remember my gushing about Life’s That Way, Jim Beaver’s memoir of the year his wife Cecily was diagnosed [...]
i can’t believe that bobby of supernatural could write stuff like this… love it… =)
[...] might remember my gushing about Life’s That Way, Jim Beaver’s memoir of the year his wife Cecily was diagnosed [...]