Our Take

What makes In Love extraordinary is Bloom's voice — warm, funny, unflinching, and incapable of self-pity. She is first and foremost a fiction writer of great skill, and she brings those instincts to memoir: the book moves like a novel, with scene and dialogue and dark comedy woven through the grief. The result is a reading experience that is genuinely hard to put down, which feels strange to say about a book with this subject matter, but is entirely true.

Bloom doesn't shy away from the ethical complexity of the choice she and Brian made, nor does she moralize about it. She simply tells you what happened, and trusts the reader to sit with the difficulty. It is one of the most honest pieces of writing about love, marriage, and loss in recent memory — and it will make you think hard about what a good death looks like, and who gets to have one.

Readers moved by In Love will find a powerful companion in The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, the definitive memoir of grief and marriage, and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, a doctor's account of confronting his own terminal diagnosis with comparable lucidity and grace. Being Mortal by Atul Gawande provides essential nonfiction context on dying, autonomy, and the limits of medicine that will resonate deeply with anyone this book has moved.