A Living Remedy

A Memoir

By: Nicole Chung

Narrated by: Jennifer Kim

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

Winner, Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing

Named a Best Book of the Year by: Time * Harper’s Bazaar * Esquire * Booklist * USA Today * Elle * Good Housekeeping * New York Times * Electric Literature * Today

From the bestselling author of ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW comes a searing memoir of family, class and grief—a daughter’s search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she’s lost.

In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them.

Nicole Chung couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she'd long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in – where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations – looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets.

When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of precarity and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his early death. And then the unthinkable happens – less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID-19 descends upon the world.

Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another – and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society.

Beautiful memoir

Shares the challenge of living in a place where no one looks like you, the deep love and grief at the loss of parents, exposes the huge gaps in the healthcare system in the US, and how we may carry anxiety in our bodies. Make sure to have tissues available as crying is unavoidable. The writing is open and vulnerable and opens up areas of the readers grief and emotions. Be sure to be in a space where you have support and can be gentle and kind with yourself during the time you’re reading this book.

Heartbreaking, gorgeous writing

Chung’s use of language in her first memoir, All You Can Ever Know, has wings. Sentences crescendo and fall away with a grace that lingers. But it’s the direct and incisive probing into the hardest parts of our lives, the tougher flesh and sinews of familial love, where Chung gives me the deepest satisfaction as a reader. A story about ailing parents, exacerbated by a failing health care system, veers into the maudlin when described by lesser writers. Chung keeps the sentimental arms-length, taut.
A Living Remedy is about compassion, stupid, and a deep abiding love. It’s also another profound gesture of charity by a truly gifted writer for those, who, like me, probably need it the most.

Points of Life

Nicole has written an appropriate book for this day and time. It contains real life problems with accuracy in facing aging parents.

Beautiful and heartfelt

This was the remedy I needed. Nicole managed to articulate so many of the complex feelings that I also experienced in caring for my mother through terminal cancer. What a gift this book was. Thank you, Nicole Chung, for sharing your experiences with us.

A story of illness and death

I love the genre memoir but found myself wondering why I was listening to this. Very well narrated. A families story about the illness and death of two parents. While certainly tragic to the family I just didn’t feel it was captivating or had the depth I would expect from a book in this genre.