“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
“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