And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman

Paints the portrait of an elderly man's struggle to hold on to his most precious memories and his family's efforts to care for him even as they must find a way to let go.

Felt drawn to this after We Spread (touched on themes of dementia/memory loss in a dark way, wanted to read something less eerie and more realistic in the realm of aging) and am very glad I was. Sad. Real. Having had a grandparent with memory loss for many years before his death, this hit a soft spot.

“What does it feel like?”

“Like constantly searching for something in your pockets. First you lose the small things, then it's the big ones. It starts with keys and ends with people.”

This book was so so beautiful.

I can't explain what it is about Fredrik Backman's writing that never fails to make me feel something.

This was heartbreaking and so real. It covered grief and loss in a way that I haven't read in a long time. I wasn't expecting something so profound from a story so short.

This will be a story that I will think about for a very long time.

“We lived an extraordinarily ordinary life.”“An ordinarily extraordinary life.”