Incisive, moving, and stripped of sentimentality, Still Phyllis finds Friedman (author of The Hand Before the Eye) facing, some two decades after the fact, a period of pain, loss, and surprising connection: the 18 months between his sister’s diagnosis, at the start of her fifties, with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, an incurable and fatal condition that, as he puts it, “had been turning Phyllis’s brain into Swiss cheese.” In scrupulous prose, Friedman relives the shock of seeing his younger sister “trapped inside her deteriorating mind, conscious of each successive loss—of language, memory, executive function.” This was a one-in-a-million diagnosis, and the neurologist brusquely announced to Friedman that there’s no known palliative treatments and little hope of Phyllis lasting a year. “Your sister needs to go to a nursing facility. She cannot be cared for by you.” But, for Friedman, family is family, and Still Phyllis finds him drawing from long-forgotten diaries as he both recounts and interrogates his choice to take Phyllis into his New Jersey home, a decision he made without consulting his wife. He writes with crisp precision of the practicalities of caring for Phyllis despite the medical system’s zeal to convince us “to exile our debilitated parents or suddenly useless spouses to institutional caretaking.” Scenes of brother and sister still managing to understand each other despite the fraying of Phyllis’s capacity for language have rich power. These edge between the touchingly playful—Upper West Sider Phyllis offers tart assessments of authors reading at the 92nd Street Y—and the profound, as in the inclusion of a handwritten note from Phyllis (“Don, I lov yu. your deep & wondreerful &so &deep”).
Friedman notes that her words still “communicated well the truths about dying—about its terrors and confusions” more powerfully than the “saccharine and, finally, empty nuggets” he’s read in the likes of Tuesdays with Morrie. That commitment to rigorous thinking and writing about life as it’s actually lived powers this first-rate memoir, an act of memory, empathy, and love.
Takeaway: Finely wrought, deeply human memoir of a sister’s neurodegenerative disorder.
Comparable Titles: Elizabeth Hay’s All Things Consoled, Philip Roth’s Patrimony.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
