“Kirshenbaum offers a deeply moving and painfully arch narrative of an artist dealing with her husband’s mental and physical decline [...] Kirshenbaum puts her lively wit to good use, tempering the sadness of her drawn-out depiction of Leo’s deterioration and Addie’s attempts to wrap her head around the ultimately lonely nature of existence. It’s a tour de force.”
It begins with hallucinations. From their living room window, Leo sees a man on stilts, an acting troupe, a pair of swans paddling on the Manhattan streets below. Then he’s unable to perform simple tasks and experiences a host of other erratic disturbances, none of which his doctors can explain. Leo, 53, a research scientist, and Addie, a collage artist, have a loving and happy marriage. They’d planned on many more years of work and travel, dinner with friends, quiet evenings at home with the cat. But as Leo’s periods of lucidity become rarer, those dreams fall away, and Addie finds herself less and less able to cope with an increasingly unbearable present.
Kirshenbaum captures the pair’s final years, months, and days in short scenes that burn with despair, dark humor, and rage, tracking the brutal destruction of the disease as well as the moments of love and beauty that still exist for them.
Praise for counting backwards
“In short, sometimes painful and sometimes funny vignettes, Kirshenbaum captures the most important details of their final years together […] Kirshenbaum’s novls are sharp harrowing, and disarmingly funny at the rawest moments.”
—Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year
—Our Culture’s Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2025
“Counting Backwards is to illness narratives what yellow is to the rainbow. It mixes well with others, but it’s going to do its own thing—brighten up a room, get on your nerves, define the beginning of a new day or the end of an old one. It’s beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This one couldn’t look away, and didn’t want to.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“…far and away Kirshenbaum’s bleakest book—which is saying something—she has not lost her knack for narrative propulsion or her ear for pitch-black comedy….I know it’s only March, but I’m calling it anyway: Counting Backwards is the feel-bad novel of the year.
—The Washington Post
—The New York Times Editors Choice
“Counting Backwards abounds in moments of beauty, humor, and tragedy. The situation of the novel is as complex as the experience of grief itself.”
—The Chicago Review of Books
“…Kirshenbaum’s use of the second person is so seamless it’s easy to forget about it completely; as a reader, you simply hop into Addie’s shoes and carry on….An exquisitely nuanced mix of bleak humor and heartrending drama.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In Kirshenbaum’s raw novel about loss, caretaking, and love, biting humor is used to relate searing observations on marriage, art, friendship, and disease.”
—Library Journal, Starred Review
“The literary equivalent of a collage with inexpected juxtapositions, Counting Backwards is a novel of exquisite sensitivity and artistry.”
—Booklist
[Kirshenbaum’s] storytelling chops are evident… Counting Backwards is a truly special novel and Kirshenbaum its star.”
—BookBrowse
“Binnie Kirshenbaum is a thrilling writer I’d follow anywhere—unflinching, darkly comic, and masterfully stylish—and now, with Counting Backwards, a sage on the intricacies of grief, the self, and what it means to love and live in the face of loss. Sharp, penetrating, and powerful.”
—Chelsea Bieker, author of Madwoman and Godshot
“A novel about the end of life that somehow brims with life, with generosity, humanity, honesty, and, unsurprisingly given the author, bouts of first-class humor. I read all 392 pages in one ten-hour span, unable to stop.”
—Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends
“Counting Backwards is a marvel of modulation—it is beautiful and devastating, heart-wrenching and darkly funny, wry and achingly empathetic. Kirshenbaum has always been a bold and outrageously gifted writer, but this novel is her finest yet.”
—Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe