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- - - - The Pharmacist's Mate By Amy Fusselman. McSweeney's, $16. Amy Fusselman is one of those deliriously uncensored writers who can find comedy in a deathbed scene. About a third of the way through her breezy but cumulatively moving memoir The Pharmacist's Mate, the author struggles to open a package of chocolate pudding for her father, who's dying in a hospital. Lost in a forest of IV drips, monitoring equipment and catheter tubing, he not surprisingly soils himself. Far from exploiting the tear-jerking moment, the author plays it for laughs. " 'Do you want them changed?' I asked. This was one of our last conversations on earth, you understand. 'Yes,' he said, looking at me like, of course, you imbecile." That sort of sensitive observational humor makes Mate an engrossing first book. Fusselman toggles between two stories in the slim volume: her aggressive search for the perfect fertility treatment and dealing with the grief over her father's death. Almost ridiculously complementary, the themes of life and death play out in a series of fragments in which the author narrates in a winking deadpan and with an eye for detail. Fusselman interpolates found text between chapters by excerpting passages from her father's logbook, which he kept during a stint as a Navy medic in World World II (hence the title). The father's scientific, Hemingway-esque style harmonizes beautifully with his daughter's prankish yet sincere curiosity about every last detail of the fertility industry. While visiting one clinic, she records the serial code and 800 service number for an ultrasound machine. This leads to a strange, inconclusive dialogue with the makers of the equipment. Her universe is a quirky but amiable place, a date between Bridget Jones and James Thurber. Like her publisher, Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), and just about anyone on the radio show This American Life, Fusselman joins the ranks of aging Gen-Xers making art out of themselves and their families. But in this memorable, beautifully structured book, she gives us more than ironic asides or a catalog of her pop-culture interests (although she supplies those, too); she makes the world strange again, a place where dying and making life are equally mysterious and miraculous activities.‹David Cote - - - -
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