praise & reviews

Chosen as one of the 100 Best Fiction/Nonfiction Books of 2009 by the San Francisco Chronicle

“As Forman illustrates in her deft and fearless book, medical authority can trample the intimacies of the body and pathologize the most private ordeal.”

“Born Too Soon” (Yale Alumni Magazine)

The lessons of This Lovely Life—both the one we all have been given as well as Vicki Forman’s indelible memoir—often are not the lessons we expect.

“Elle’s Lettres,” Readers Prize

Forman’s account of giving birth to premature twins is stark, heartbreaking, and beautiful.  Thrust into a role that on one expects to play, she becomes at once a parent, an expert in medical terminology, and a spectator to her own life.  She invites us to witness as she wrestles with decisions that nobody should have to make, but does so with amazing poise and honestly.

San Francisco Chronicle Featured Review

I might say that “This Lovely Life” is an indictment of our health care system (Forman has an excellent ear for doctors’ hostility and inadvertent cruelty), or a passionate treatise on mother love, and certainly you could read the book for confirmation of both, but I don’t think the author cares to make those judgments. She is neither apologetic nor unapologetic: She writes more for a fierce private truth than for any published effect. It is our good fortune to witness a beautiful heart beating out its own epic.

“Life is Beautiful” (The Rumpus)

This Lovely Life is an honest, hopeful account of what one writer does when faced with unthinkable hardship and heartbreak, how she struggles to cope with the reality of her new life, how she creates meaning, finds beauty and even loveliness, amidst suffering.

Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

Forman’s enormously affecting memoir—winner of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize—about the drastic disabilities of her extremely premature child poses challenging questions about parenthood and human compassion. Having given birth to twins at just six months’ gestation (23 weeks), due to an undetected infection she learned of only much later, the author, living with her husband and three-year-old daughter in Southern California, and aware of the daunting health issues facing these babies, begged the doctors to “let them go.” However, the doctors refused the “do-not-resuscitate” order, offering the infants every form of neonatal intensive care available, and while one of the twins died within days, the boy, Evan, survived, spending six months in the hospital before the family could take him home. Evan was plagued by severe developmental difficulties, including seizures, cerebral palsy, mental retardation, congenital heart defect and blindness, and the author writes with unflinching honesty about her raw fear and conflicted feelings. With time, Forman persevered as Evan’s advocate, finding solace in friendships with other mothers of special-needs children and open to experimental therapies that might prove helpful. Numbed by the crass exigencies surrounding the burial of one child (cemetery plots, tax forms), and hardened by what she terms post-traumatic stress syndrome, Forman portrays herself (sometimes shockingly) as deeply flawed and forgivingly human. (July)

Kirkus

Forman explores the many issues of premature birth without presuming to offer solutions or comfort, drawing directly from the raw outrage, torment and profound sorrow she recorded in her journal. She makes it her life purpose to stay apace with the minutiae of her children’s fragile, ever-changing conditions, doggedly expanding her knowledge of medical terminology and navigating every diagnostic twist and turn with research, skepticism and occasional self-doubt. Beneath her outward mettle is a mother who is continually probing every phase of the grief process. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance do not progress in conventional order but churn and shift within her consciousness on a minute-by-minute basis, depending on the latest lab report, nurse’s comment or conference with doctors. Forman’s lack of pretense is bracing and brutally poignant, and she recounts her experiences in meticulous emotive and medical detail. Whether praising or condemning hospital staff, wrestling with the marital pressures engendered by family health crises, struggling to find spiritual solace, driving her son 1,000 miles to an alternative-treatment center or watching him happily roll around on the motel bed, Forman is a warrior. Threaded through her untethered courage and candor are moments of sheer helplessness: “They say it’s your baby, but until you go home it’s not your baby.”

A searing tale of heartache and impressive depth of character.

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“It would be difficult not to be stirred by Vicki Forman’s story; but what makes This Lovely Life so good goes well past story and into idea, with which her book is so rich. The idea of love; of choice; of ambivalence; of imperfection; of purpose: these are all here, in a narrative that is propulsive, startling and vivid, like motherhood itself.”

—Meg Wolitzer, author of The Ten Year Nap and Surrender, Dorothy

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“Intimate, compelling, and hopeful—an absolutely important book.”

—Rachel Simon, author of Riding in the Bus with My Sister

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“Vicki Forman’s This Lovely Life is its own kind of koan—a story about death that is full of life, a story about loss rich with things gained, a story of letting go, while at the same time holding on tightly to what we love best. Spare, bracing, lovely.”

—Jennifer Graf Groneberg, author of Road Map to Holland

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“If such a heartbreaking story must be any parent’s to tell at all, I’m thankful that it should fall to such a talented voice as Vicki Forman to bring it to the rest of us. Forman writes with sensitivity and clarity; her love is powerful and her eyes are wide open. This Lovely Life is a beautiful story of loss and love, and ultimately of understanding, one that left me shaken, haunted and deeply moved long after I finished reading.”

—Robert Rummel-Hudson, author of Schuyler’s Monster

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“This Lovely Life manages to accomplish something that no other book about NICUs, or pediatrics, or chronic illness, has managed to accomplish – to tell a true story, in the first person, that captures the full range of ambiguity of the experiences of having a critically ill baby in a modern hospital, of living through the death of a child, and of raising a child with severe chronic illness.”

–John Lantos, author of The Lazarus Case and Do We Still Need Doctors?

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“This is a story about children born into circumstances medicine cannot currently prevent and no parent could possibly prepare for. It begins with a scene of almost unendurable horror. When the worst (one assumes) has passed, the reader awaits the various authorial balms, tonal coolants, and narrative stand downs demanded by such a trauma-splashed opening. But the reader quickly staggers into another, even more intimate horror, and then another, and then another. A tiny, cherished hope somehow endures that things will eventually improve for the author, Vicki Forman, and her increasingly devastated family. Such hopes are repeatedly incinerated in reality’s unforgiving atmosphere. By the end, the long-delayed first steps of a five-year-old child will seem the fist-pumping stuff of a more traditional triumph narrative. And yet This Lovely Life is not at all depressing. When I finished this book I felt, rather, an electric, wide-awake sadness, as though I had lost and made a close friend on the same day.”

–Tom Bissell, author of The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son and the Legacy of Vietnam