Home Is Burning

Starred review from October 19, 2015
In this impressive debut, Marshall relates the bleak reality of caring for his father after ALSâalso known as Lou Gehrig's diseaseâbegan wreaking havoc on his body. The disease had a dramatic effect on the entire family, already reeling from their mother's ongoing battle with cancer. Memoirs about a family member who has contracted a terminal illness are almost tediously common, but most of them don't include jokes about oral sex or puns on the word "dystrophy." Fortunately for readers, Marshall's brain is wired for profanity, gallows humor, and graphic self-deprecation, and the rest of his family is not much different. Marshall evokes sympathy, but never pity, as he conveys his family's pain through fart jokes, farcical misadventures (sexual and medical), andâin the middle of all the confusionâemotion so raw and potent it's almost jarring. Honesty is the key; Marshall never shies away from the filthy, uncomfortable reality, and it's that brutal truth-telling that makes his memoir a must-read.

August 15, 2015
In his first book, a 20-something recounts his battles with caring for a mother fighting cancer and a father with Lou Gehrig's disease. As a young professional newly graduated from college, Utah native Marshall was on top of the world. Not only did he and his siblings come from wealth and live with "the proverbial silver spoon jammed firmly up our asses"; he also had a job and girlfriend he loved in Los Angeles, a city he enjoyed for its "traffic and pollution and assholes speeding around in BMWs." The one shadow on his good fortune was having a mother sick with cancer. But even that difficulty was one Marshall and his family had overcome thanks to his father, a man who had held chaos at bay with his unflagging devotion to them all. Then one day, Marshall learned that his father had been diagnosed with ALS, a disease that was "a real ugly motherfucker and...pretty much a death sentence." At first, the family tried to carry on their lives as though nothing had changed. However, less than a year after the diagnosis, Marshall's siblings told him that he needed to come home to help care for both parents. It was then he realized that "life [wasn't] all about gin and tonics and sunsets." For the next year, Marshall watched as his once healthy and active father declined into near total helplessness and his traumatized mother reeled from chemotherapy and drugs that addled her brain. Relationships between him, his siblings, and his friends strained to the breaking point. Marshall then had to face his own personal losses, which included the end of a long-term relationship he believed would culminate in marriage. Though the author's potty-mouthed profanity can be trying, the book is funny, heartbreaking, and unapologetically crude. Strangely enough, as Marshall is forced into awareness of life's harsher realities and grows up, his linguistic coarseness gives way to a narrative that manages to be quite touching. A poignantly provocative memoir.

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September 15, 2015
Recent grad Marshall leaves it all behindjob, girlfriend, dream life in L.A.to return home to Utah to care for his parents. His mother has had cancer for 15 years, and it's back with a vengeance. Worse in some ways, his marathon-running, take-charge dad is rapidly disappearing into Lou Gehrig's disease. Despite the book's continual bad language and many morbid jokes, it's a weeper nearly from page 1. How could anyone handle the thought of losing both parents almost at once, especially when there are two teen sisters at home also needing help? Marshall and his other siblings shoulder it allby swearing, drinking, racing wheelchairs down the halls of hospitals, and caring for their loved oneswhile their world somewhat literally falls down around them. This memoir offers a been-there, done-that to those who have perhaps only partially been there, and lessons on the necessity and difficulty of letting go can be found among the miasma of Marshall's trying to do it all. He doesn't fail, but he's only human. That's what counts most in this raucous, rowdy, heartbreaking story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)