How Linda Died

By Frank Davey

A husband's unflinching account of his wife's unravelling. How Linda Died is Frank Davey's powerful and painfully precise account of his wife's fight against an inoperable brain tumor.

Linda's proud refusal to tell anyone about her deteriorating condition left Frank with few people to confide in. As Linda's mind fell victim to cancer, Frank took to recording his memories with increasingly compulsive and private intensity. He found himself reckoning with the demons of a past that Linda could no longer share and mourning the loss of a present she could no longer enjoy. At the same time, he found himself reflecting on the habits, rituals, and diversions that punctuated his life. How could he reconcile his passion for showing prize-winning Great Danes with's debilitating illness? How could he talk about the great wines he loved or the fabulous coq au vin they had shared right after he talked about the clinical details of her approaching death or her bizarre behaviour?

What makes this book so special -- and in many ways so brilliantly odd -- is the life-defining contrasts it records, often in a single breath. At once a shattering portrayal of a devastating disease and an obsessive record of one man's self-interrogation amidst a welter of conflicting emotions, How Linda Died is a gripping memoir, beautiful in its morbidity and searing in its relentless refusal to sidestep the truth.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1550224972
• ISBN13: 9781550224979
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A moving account

How Linda Died recounts the author's wife's decline and death from a brain tumor, through the recording of moment-by-moment observations of a struggle for life in the face of insurmountable odds. From the daily challenges of remembering phone numbers to dealing with other life stresses and grief, How Linda Died is a moving account.

How Linda Died is a fine book

The author's approach to describing his wife's illness in this book is really wonderful. As the woman he once knew and loved gradually becomes inaccessible (due to her brain tumour), Davey struggles to maintain a "real" grasp of who Linda really is/was. He struggles to be honest with himself, and true to her wishes to not romanticize her. He self-reflexively approaches Linda as both his intimate, his life-partner, and also as a living being who is self-determining, dynamic, at times inconsistent, and therefore impossible to 'pin down.' The journal entries, which record the practical details of their day to day life, and dealing with the illness,give the book the sense of 'writing as a form of survival.' The journal as a lifeline. The compulsion to continue when the sky is falling. This book is so unbelievably personal.