We All Want Impossible Things: A Novel

Edi and Ashley have been best friends their entire lives—more than four decades—and now, three years after her ovarian cancer diagnosis, Edi is ceasing treatments and entering hospice care. It's gutting: Edi's dying too young, in pain, and making impossible decisions like how to say goodbye to her 7-year-old son. Ash is desperately trying to hide her grief from her friend, but it's making itself felt in big and small ways. It's all so hard to read. But this novel is also filled with so much life and humor, on practically every page. For while Edi's suburban hospice may be filled with the dying, it is also still filled with life, and with forty years of memories from an exceptional, joy-filled, through-thick-and-thin friendship. I noticed the German translation bears a different title, which gets more directly at the coexistence of joy and pain in this novel: Und wir tanzen, und wir fallen: "And We Dance, and We Fall." The audio version, narrated by Jane Oppenheimer, was an excellent choice for this first person story.