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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Mar 2010, 176 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2011, 128 pages
Book Reviewed by:
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When his daughter, Amy, died suddenly of a heart condition, Roger Rosenblatt and his wife moved in with their son-in-law and their three young grandchildren. His story tells how a family makes the possible out of the impossible.
When his daughter Amy, a gifted doctor, mother, and wife collapsed and died from an asymptomatic heart condition, Roger Rosenblatt and his wife, Ginny, left their home on the South Shore of Long Island to move in with their son-in-law, Harris, and their three young grandchildren. With the wit, heart, precision, and depth of understanding that has characterized his work, Roger Rosenblatt peels back the layers on this most personal of losses to create both a tribute to his late daughter and a testament to familial love. The day Amy died, Harris told Ginny and Roger, "It's impossible." Rosenblatt's story tells how a family makes the possible out of the impossible.
With the wit, heart, precision, and depth of understanding that has characterized his work, Roger Rosenblatt peels back the layers on this most personal of losses to create both a tribute to his late daughter and a testament to familial love.
Excerpt
Making Toast
The trick in foraging for a tooth lost in coffee grounds is not to be misled by the clumps. The only way to be sure is to rub each clump between your thumb and index finger, which makes a mess of your hands. For some twenty minutes this morning, Ginny and I have been hunting in the kitchen trash can for the top left front tooth of our seven-year-old granddaughter, Jessica. Loose for days but not yet dislodged, the tooth finally dropped into a bowl of Apple Jacks. I wrapped it for safekeeping in a paper napkin and put it on the kitchen counter, but it was mistaken for trash by Ligaya, Bubbies’s nanny. Bubbies (James) is twenty-three months and the youngest of our daughter Amy’s three children. Sammy, who is five, is uninterested in the tooth search, and Jessie is unaware of it. We would prefer to find the tooth, so that Jessie won’t worry about the Tooth Fairy not showing up.
This sort of activity has constituted our life since Amy died, last ...
22 out of 27 BookBrowse readers gave Making Toast 4 or 5 stars. Here's what they had to say:
A wonderfully written account of how one family handles a very painful event. I can think of no more heartwarming relationship than a grandparent and grandchild. Although this relationship is forged through painful conditions, the story is told in such an honest and factual, but warm and loving way that this is a book you will learn from and remember (C H). This is without a doubt the best book I have ever read on how to "get on with getting on". Making Toast will make you cry, but in doing so it might make you a better person. Read this book (Lois G)!..continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse First Impression Reviewers).
Ann Beattie
Written so forthrightly, but so delicately, that you feel you're a part of this family. E.L. Doctorow
A painfully beautiful memoir telling how grandparents are made over into parents, how people die out of order, how time goes backwards. Written with such restraint as to be both heartbreaking and instructive.Roger Rosenblatt
Roger Rosenblatt (born in 1940), is a journalist, author, playwright, and teacher.
His contributions to Time and PBS have won two George Polk Awards, a Peabody Award,
and an Emmy Award. He is the author of five Off-Broadway plays and twelve books,
including the national bestseller Rules
for Aging and Children of War, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize
and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Lapham
Rising, also a national bestseller, was his first novel.
Roger Rosenblatt discusses Making Toast:
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