Fall Sale! Join BookBrowse today and discover exceptional books for only $3 / Month.

Excerpt from This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reading Guide |  Reviews |  Beyond the Book |  Readalikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

This Is Where I Leave You

by Jonathan Tropper
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • First Published:
  • Aug 6, 2009, 352 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jul 2010, 352 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About this Book

Print Excerpt

Chapter 1

Dad’s dead," Wendy says off handedly, like it’s happened before, like it happens every day. It can be grating, this act of hers, to be utterly unfazed at all times, even in the face of tragedy. "He died two hours ago."

"How’s Mom doing?"

"She’s Mom, you know? She wanted to know how much to tip the coroner."

I have to smile, even as I chafe, as always, at our family’s patented inability to express emotion during watershed events. There is no occasion calling for sincerity that the Foxman family won’t quickly diminish or pervert through our own genetically engineered brand of irony and evasion. We banter, quip, and insult our way through birthdays, holidays, weddings, illnesses. Now Dad is dead and Wendy is cracking wise.

It serves him right, since he was something of a pioneer at the forefront of emotional repression.

"It gets better," Wendy says.

"Better? Jesus, Wendy, do you hear yourself?"

"Okay, that came out wrong."

"You think?"

"He asked us to sit shiva."

"Who did?"

"Who are we talking about? Dad! Dad wanted us to sit shiva."

"Dad’s dead."

Wendy sighs, like it’s positively exhausting having to navigate the dense forest of my obtuseness. "Yes, apparently, that’s the optimal time to do it."

"But Dad’s an atheist."

"Dad was an atheist."

"You’re telling me he found God before he died?"

"No, I’m telling you he’s dead and you should conjugate your tenses accordingly."

If we sound like a couple of callous assholes, it’s because that’s how we were raised. But in fairness, we’d been mourning for a while already, on and off since he was first diagnosed a year and a half earlier. He’d been having stomachaches, swatting away my mother’s pleas that he see a doctor, choosing instead to increase the regimen of the same antacids he’d been taking for years. He popped them like Life Savers, dropping small squibs of foil wrapping wherever he went, so that the carpets glittered like wet pavement. Then his stool turned red.

"Your father’s not feeling well," my mother understated over the phone.

"My shit’s bleeding," he groused from somewhere behind her. In the fifteen years since I’d moved out of the house, Dad never came to the phone. It was always Mom, with Dad in the background, contributing the odd comment when it suited him. That’s how it was in person too. Mom always took center stage. Marrying her was like joining the chorus.

On the CAT scan, tumors bloomed like flowers against the charcoal desert of his duodenal lining. Into the lore of Dad’s legendary stoicism would be added the fact that he spent a year treating metastatic stomach cancer with Tums. There were the predictable surgeries, the radiation, and then the Hail Mary rounds of chemo meant to shrink the tumors but that instead shrank him, his once broad shoulders reduced to skeletal knobs that disappeared beneath the surface of his slack skin.

Then came the withering of muscle and sinew and the sad, crumbling descent into extreme pain management, culminating with him slipping into a coma, the one we knew he’d never come out of. And why should he? Why wake up to the painful, execrable mess of end-stage stomach cancer? It took four months for him to die, three more than the oncologists had predicted. "Your dad’s a fighter," they would say when we visited, which was a crock, because he’d already been soundly beaten. If he was at all aware, he had to be pissed at how long it was taking him to do something as simple as die. Dad didn’t believe in God, but he was a life- long member of the Church of Shit or Get Off the Can.

So his actual death itself was less an event than a final sad detail.

Excerpted from This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper. Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Tropper. Excerpted by permission of Dutton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book:
  Sitting Shiva

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Playground
    Playground
    by Richard Powers
    The primary narrator of Richard Powers' latest novel, Playground, is Todd Keane, who at 57 years old...
  • Book Jacket: The Empusium
    The Empusium
    by Olga Tokarczuk
    Not long after checking into Willi Opitz's "Guesthouse for Gentlemen," young Mieczysław Wojnicz...
  • Book Jacket
    Suggested in the Stars
    by Yoko Tawada
    In Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada's 2018 lightly dystopian novel, a ragtag group of young...
  • Book Jacket: Shred Sisters
    Shred Sisters
    by Betsy Lerner
    "No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister" is a wry aphorism that appears late in ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    The Naming Song
    by Jedediah Berry

    Miyazaki meets Guillermo del Toro.

  • Book Jacket

    In the Garden of Monsters
    by Crystal King

    A woman with no past, a man who knows her, and a monstrous garden that separates their worlds.

Book Club Giveaway!
Win Let Us Descend

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward imagines the life of an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War in this instant classic.

Enter

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

J O the B

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.