Goodbye, Vitamin
Rachel Khong, 2017
Henry Holt & Co.
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250109163
Summary
Her life at a crossroads, a young woman goes home again in this funny and inescapably moving debut from a wonderfully original new literary voice.
Freshly disengaged from her fiance and feeling that life has not turned out quite the way she planned, thirty-year-old Ruth quits her job, leaves town and arrives at her parents’ home to find that situation more complicated than she'd realized.
Her father, a prominent history professor, is losing his memory and is only erratically lucid. Ruth’s mother, meanwhile, is lucidly erratic. But as Ruth's father’s condition intensifies, the comedy in her situation takes hold, gently transforming her all her grief.
Told in captivating glimpses and drawn from a deep well of insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Goodbye, Vitamin pilots through the loss, love, and absurdity of finding one’s footing in this life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1985-86
• Raised—southern California, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., University of Florida
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California
Rachel Khong is Chinese-American food writer and author. Her 2017 debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, is about a young woman who returns home to find her father afflicted with Alzheimer's. She is also one of the writers of the 2017 nonfiction book, All About Eggs: Everything We Know About the World's Most Important Food, a compilation of essays, recipes, anecdotes by the Lucky Peach editorial staff.
Khong's parents immigrated from China to the States when she was two. She grew up in southern California, earned her Bachelor's from Yale and her Master's from the University of Florida. Returning to California, this time to San Francisco, Khong worked in restaurants and then, in 2011, landed a job as the managing editor for the food journal Lucky Peach. Five years later, she became the magazine's executive editor. She left Lucky Peach in 2016, shortly before it folded, in order to devote herself to full-time writing.
Khong's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Believer, Pitchfork and Village Voice. In 2013, she was named one of Refinery29's 30 under 30. (Adapted from varioius online souces.)
Read the author's interview with Vogue magazine.
Book Reviews
A heartwarming book about Alzheimer's disease? Seriously? Rachel Khong's first novel comes adorned with rows of hot pink, orange, and yellow lemons, but a pitcher of lemonade would have been apt too, for this is a writer who clearly knows how to squeeze the sweetness out of the tart fruit life throws at you.
Heller McAlpin - NPR
Wry, warmhearted, and wise, Khong’s writing can turn mid-sentence from really funny to really sad, and often back again. Her subject is disease, but she (and her characters) resist any impulse to pathologize.… Khong’s novel will stay with you long after you turn the last page. What more can be said for a book about remembering?
Julia Felsenthal - Vogue
Goodbye, Vitamin is one of those rare books that is both devastating and light-hearted, heartfelt and joyful, making it a perfect and unique summer read. Don't miss it.
Isaac Fitzgerald - BuzzFeed
Tender yet funny in turns, Goodbye, Vitamin offers poignant insight into family, memory, marriage, parenthood, love, and loss.
Jarry Lee - BuzzFeed
A darkly funny debut novel about love, loss, and heartbreak.
PopSugar
A good mix of humor and love.
Elle
Tragic and funny.
Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review.) In her tender, well-paced debut novel … Khong writes heartbreaking family drama with charm, perfect prose, and deadpan humor.
Booklist
[A] heartfelt family dramedy in a debut novel that ruminates on love, loss, and memory.… Ruth and Howard are a hilarious father-daughter duo, at turns destructive and endearing, and … Khong's pithy observations and cynical humor round out a moving story that sparks empathy where you'd least expect it.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Goodbye, Vitamin … then take off on your own:
1. What do you think of Ruth Young?
2. How does Ruth respond to the breakup with her finance Joel? What do you think of the line, "You know what else is unfair, about Joel? That I loosened the jar lid, so somebody else could open him"? What does she mean?
3. Talk about Ruth's relationships with her parents, especially with her father. Consider the journal her father kept when she was a little girl. How has her relationship with Howard changed now that he is ill?
4. What happened to the family after Ruth left home, and why did she stay away for so long?
5. Talk about Ruth's mother. How does she react to (or cope with) Howard's increasing illness?
6. What do you think of the graduate students' ruse: to pretend that Howard has been reinstated to his academic position? Helpful? Cruel? Funny? Does it help him, "keep his mind off, well, losing it"?
7. How does the book treat the function of memory— the way it identifies us, fails us, haunts us, pains us … and, of course, enables us to function? Ruth once describes her memory, for example of Joel, "like an ancient candlestick from some wrecked ship." What does she mean by that? Talk about your experiences with your own memory. Are we our memories?
8. Has anyone in your life been a victim of Alzheimer's? If so, is the author's account of it in Goodbye, Vitamin realistic?
9. Talk about the book's title: how does it relate to the story? Consider, too, the book's cover (hardback edition) with its pink, orange, and yellow lemons. What do the lemons suggest about the story inside?
10. Many reviewers comment on the book's humor. How does Khong manage to take a desperately grim subject and turn it into something less grim? What is Khong's technique as a writer?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)