Realizing he was a member of a tangled (a favorite word of the author) group of transsexuals, James felt himself trapped in a conundrum of gender (he felt and considered himself female) versus sex (he was genotypically and phenotypically male). “To me gender is not physical at all but is altogether insubstantial; it is soul, perhaps, it is talent it is the essentialness of oneself” (p.25).  

After some fruitless interactions with the medical profession, Morris travels to Casablanca in the summer of 1972 to undergo sex-changing surgery and becomes Jan Morris. Unlike many if not most transsexuals, post-operatively Morris fared quite well emotionally and was quite happy with the change.  

Jan Morris’s writing is as humorous and eloquent as James Morris’s was. She describes how magazines like Rolling Stone, publishers like Random House, and thousands of readers have never cared what gender or sex was holding the pen; how life changed in clubs, restaurants, and in taxicabs, where Jan met the first man to kiss her, post surgery, “in a carnal way” (p.151). Morris records that “all I did was blush.” 

As the chronicle of one sensitive and highly literate man’s journey from manhood to womanhood, Conundrum offers much commentary on the states of mind of a transsexual, a highly polished writer undergoing the humoral, mental, emotional, and cultural changes of such surgery.  

Prior to surgery, Morris writes about feeling deprived of an identity: “I realize now that the chief cause of my disquiet was the fact that I had none. I was not to others what I was to myself. I did not conform to the dictionary’s definition–‘itself and not something else’ ” (p.40-41). All Morris wanted “was liberation, or reconciliation–to live as myself, to clothe myself in a more proper body, and achieve Identity at last” (p.104). It took courage but it was worth it and Conundrum reads like nothing more, and nothing less, than a successful odyssey of the sexual soul. 

Jan Morris died in 2020, aged 94. 

Jan Morris: Journalist, Historian, ‘Writer About Place’ – Faculty of English

Conundrum
Jan Morris 
New York Review of Books Classics, paperback 2006: 176 pages 
Originally published by Faber and Faber, London, 1974 

Web image by medhum

At age nine, first misdiagnosed and finally identified as having facial bone cancer (Ewing’s sarcoma), Lucy underwent several surgeries and more than two years of intensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Pain and nausea, anxiety and fear of more pain and nausea were only part of the ordeal. The young Lucy became aware of what it is to be severely, chronically ill. Her sisters behaved differently toward her: they were polite. “Suddenly I understood the term visiting. I was in one place, they were in another, and they were only pausing.” Even her father felt uncomfortable at her hospital bedside, and Lucy was relieved that he came infrequently.

But being at home was worse: in the hospital the other patients and the staff expected little from her and she felt no guilt or shame; amidst her family, she blamed herself for the tension, arguments over money, and her mother’s depression, even though these elements had existed prior to her illness. Her hair fell out and she became dimly aware that people were staring at her face. Nevertheless, “I . . . was naturally adept at protecting myself from the hurt of their insults and felt a vague superiority . . . . “

Well enough to return to school, Lucy’s disfigured face drew taunts from classmates; she understood finally that she was perceived as ugly and that she would not be loved. Only on Halloween, when she could mask her face, did she feel free and joyful, unconcerned about her appearance, “normal.” Her moods now alternated between despair, determination, and escapism. She became convinced that only facial reconstruction and a restored appearance would make life bearable.

During years of reconstructive surgery Lucy evolved complex rationalizations to give meaning to her suffering. Two anchors had stabilized her existence throughout the misery: a passionate adolescent love of horses, and an adult love of poetry. Eventually outward appearance and inner life became harmonious. “The journey back to my face was a long one.”

Unfortunately, Lucy’s story does not end here. At age 39 she committed suicide. Soon after, her close friend, writer Ann Patchett, wrote a book about their friendship, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, published in 2003 (HarperPerennial).

Lucy Grealy Interview in 1994 (20 Min.)

Autobiography of a Face
Lucy Grealy
Houghton Mifflin 1994 Boston: 256 pages

1995 Whiting Award Winner in Nonfiction , Poetry: https://www.whiting.org/awards/winners/lucy-grealy
Web image generated from the book cover by Medhum.

The house sits at the foot of a spring-green mountain, painted over with long cascading strokes of darker green, giving the impression of a verdant and peaceful setting. Contrast this to the brown ridge where the figure is sitting, huddled in a long sleeve jacket, hands tucked into pockets. The ridge is barren except for a single tree that is mostly bare branches with sparse pale-pink leaves.

Matthew Wong was a rising young painter who died of suicide on October 2, 2019. In a moving obituary by the New York Times, his mother explained that Mr. Wong “was on the autism spectrum, had Tourette’s syndrome and had grappled with depression since childhood.” This helps to explain the sense of isolation and longing in the painting, depicted by the solitary figure on a barren ridge, looking back at a house in lush green surroundings. The figure also appears to be physically cold, wrapped in long sleeve coat, hands tucked in pockets, with no skin showing, but is sadly separated from shelter by an icy white distance. This dynamic, amidst a landscape of majestic mountain rising into star-crowded sky, gives a sense of melancholy beauty and loneliness.

The title of the painting, “See you on the Other Side,” can be interpreted in numerous ways. Mr. Wong is known for incorporating mythical elements into his work, so is this the beginning of the hero’s journey? If the tree in the foreground is interpreted as being laden with pale pink flower buds, there is a sense of hope and promise that the figure is leaving home and will return triumphant on the other side. But the tree can also be seen as a representation of fall transitioning into winter, hanging onto a few withered leaves, as the last bright red autumnal leaf blows away. Is the figure heading away from the verdant house and mountain into winter, the season that classically symbolizes death? Does the other side refer to an afterlife? A third interpretation to consider is that the figure is not leaving the house, but actually trying to get there. In this case, on the other side would refer to crossing the vast white expanse where no path is marked and no help is in sight.

View the painting at Museum of Fine Arts Boston ➔

Matthew Wong’s Biography: www.matthewwongfoundation.org/biography
A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.
Web image from www.matthewwongfoundation.org/

A turning point comes in the fifth sestet and, to signal it, Lowell takes as his first line the famous “Una noche oscura” of St. John of the Cross, another dour poet/mystic: “One dark night”. This line begins the first of two consecutive sestets that are concerned with corporal love, bracketing a middle line that announces, to no reader’s surprise, “My mind’s not right.” The second of these sestets moves from a maudlin song refrain to a frankly depressive, almost suicidal pose: “I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, / as if my hand were at its throat. . . .” and ends with “I myself am hell; / nobody’s here –“, which is a quotation from Satan in Book IV of Paradise Lost.

Enter the titular skunks: as a parenthetical predicate to the final line of the preceding sestet (“nobody’s here –“), the poet corrects the apparently psychological meaning of “nobody’s here –” to refer to physical presence, noting that in fact there is someone here, namely a family of skunks.

The final two sestets are among the most visually powerful images in poetry with the paradoxically high drama one would not expect from skunks. The hungry skunks “march on their soles up Main Street” in search of food with fiery red eyes as the poet, in response to their upward march, stands “on top / of our back steps” and takes a deep breath of the “rich air”, watching the mother skunk jab her head into a cup of sour cream–a mother skunk who, in a fitting yet curiously ambiguous final line, “will not scare.”

This is one of my favorite poems for a number of reasons. The honesty that eventually surfaces–the poem is after all about the self-recognition of a mind that “is not right”–is stark. It confronts the reader with the admission and dares him or her to probe into the poet’s reading of the persons and events around him. The poet’s choice of skunks as an implied comparison of his affectual state, one that feels isolated, a pariah among fellow animals, is stunning. The last lines are assertive and, one hopes for the poet’s sake, encouraging, as though the narrator finds in the skunks’ indomitable nature a source of self-reliance. As opposed to the dark “red fox stain” covering Blue Hill in the third sestet, red now promises a more optimistic interpretation, describing as it does the skunks’ defiant eyes: “moonstruck eyes’ red fire”.

As gloomy as the tone is, the poet cannot refrain from puns, another trace of his reluctance to give up poetic creativity in the face of depression. Lowell describes the Ford as a Tudor (two door). The love cars “lay together, hull to hull,” enjoying the double entendre of “lay.” The skunks “march on their soles [read “souls”] up Main Street” under the Trinitarian Church.

The economy and denseness of this poem is remarkable. Within 48 lines one encounters many of the colors of the rainbow (we have white, blue, orange, red) with a clever use of red as a focal point for a possible mood shift, with the second instance subverting the meaning of the first, as mentioned above. The puns of course add semantic value. We also have references and implicit indictments of physical love and the church as organized religion (the poet’s Ford climbs “the hill’s skull,” i.e., Golgotha, when he begins his voyeuristic watch for “love-cars”; the skunks’ “white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire” contrast with “the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church.”)

Much of the compressed effect derives from the force of the last lines–often spondaic–in the sestets, telegraphic lines that reinforce the gravity of the drear poetic commentary. The sequential staccato lines are: “she’s in her dotage”; “and lets them fall”; “A red fox stain covers Blue Hill”; “he’d rather marry”; “My mind’s not right”; “nobody’s here”; “of the Trinitarian Church”; “and will not scare.” The last line, “and will not scare” is reminiscent of the ending of the last line of Tennyson’s Ulysses: “[To strive to seek to find] and not to yield.” Strength and meaning are found within, in one’s self, not in the decadent civilization we see in the first four sestets.

This poem is dedicated to Lowell’s contemporary and friend, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), who wrote “The Armadillo” (1957), inscribed to Robert Lowell. Both are poems about animals outré even in the animal kingdom, quadriped analogies to dissident and isolated poets, and both poets depict them as defiant and insouciant rebels worthy of human attention.

Read the Poem Online

Source Life Studies
Publisher Random House/Vintage
Edition 1959
Place Published New York
Miscellaneous The book in which this poem appeared won the National Book Award.
A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database. 
Web photo of Robert Lowell created from an original from Wiki Commons.

Field Guide to Falling Ill: Essays by Jonathan Gleason 

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2026, 256 pages 
ISBN 9780300282948

In these ten exemplary essays, Gleason mingles illness memoir, the challenges of caregiving, and loss (of health and spirit). Disease is portrayed not only as an aberration of the body’s normal homeostasis but also a distinctive event with social, cultural, and possibly historical meaning. Contagions (viruses, prejudices, even love) receive special attention as catalysts of uncertainty, anxiety, and sometimes terror. Spaces – inner, close, distant, and built – are similarly scrutinized. In 1623, the English poet John Donne declared that “the greatest misery of sickness is solitude.” The narrator of the title essay echoes that sentiment, describing “loneliness” as the world’s greatest sorrow. He volunteers as a part-time medical interpreter at a free clinic but suddenly becomes a patient himself with a blood clot in the left arm. These experiences lead to an understanding of the power and limitations of both language and empathy. Other essays explore organ donation, AIDS, mental illness and the demise of large psychiatric hospitals, Tay-Sachs disease and xenophobia, pain, addiction, and the trial of an Ohio doctor charged with multiple counts of murder. Throughout these pages, Gleason points out the hubris of medicine as well as its shortcomings. He writes, “We like to believe we know the vastness of the world, that everything can be explained through our current models of understanding” (p3). At some point (or maybe many times), however, we will all fall ill and become a patient. And that immense world with all its scientific knowledge will dramatically contract to our single suffering body longing to be comforted and cherished by others. 

“An Eye in the Throat” in Good and Evil and Other Stories (pages 57-96) by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell  

New York, NY: Knopf, 2025, 192 pages 
ISBN 9780593803103 

It’s every parent’s nightmare: a serious (and potentially preventable) injury to their child that occurs right in front of them. Here, the setting is Argentina in the 1990’s. Inquisitive two-year-old Elías chokes on a lithium battery from his grandmother’s digital calculator while his father is in charge of watching him play. A visit to the ER and then an appointment with the family doctor the next day offers little reassurance for the parents. On the third day, Elías begins coughing and develops a fever. An operation is performed to remove the lodged battery and repair tissue damage to the esophagus. A tracheostomy is performed, and he undergoes four operations in a span of six years. He is unable to speak. At one point, he mysteriously gets out of his car seat and briefly becomes lost at a gas station. Soon after, a landline phone at home eerily rings each night. When the father answers, there is no voice at the other end. The parents eventually separate. Elías comprehends that all family members are casualties, and with an amazing capacity for empathy concludes, “There is a hole in my throat, a hole in my body that hurts in theirs” (p79). He is enrolled in a special school for deaf and mute children and becomes an outstanding student who is enthralled by language and mathematical physics. Schweblin’s searing story about parental guilt and grieving, failed communication, and the remarkable resiliency of youth is guaranteed to leave you with a lump in your throat. 

A Prescription for Burnout: Restorative Writing for Healthcare Professionals by Carolyn Roy-Bornstein 

Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026, 208 pages 
ISBN 9781421454733 

Burnout among physicians and nurses, accelerated by the emotional and physical crush of the Covid-19 pandemic, continues to be an urgent problem. Causes of burnout among health professionals include an erosion of autonomy, truncated time allotted for patient visits (but increased time required for inputting data into the electronic medical record system), feeling underappreciated, unrealistic expectations from patients and employers, and the daily exposure to the suffering of others. Roy-Bornstein, a pediatrician and a former RN, enthusiastically endorses reflective writing as an effective remedy for dealing with burnout (or perhaps preventing its occurrence). While not a new concept, her discussion includes research on the utility of restorative writing, some commentary on narrative medicine, and most importantly, more than 85 writing prompts (or Rx’s as she refers to them) for reflection and as a kind of therapeutic exercise. Organized into three sections – Addressing Emotional Exhaustion, Countering Cynicism, and Restoring Self-Efficacy – the book addresses issues of vulnerability, self-compassion, self-awareness, resilience, and optimism. There is no doubt that reflective writing can be healing and hopeful. Roy-Bornstein offers a helpful pathway to reducing the risk of professional burnout.  

Vesalius’s illustration, “Skeleton Contemplating a Skull” from Wellcome Collection

Directed by Anne Kauffman, the play features “Primes,” or holographic simulations of the dead intended for therapeutic use by the living. June Squibb—who, at 96, is making history as the oldest performer to open a Broadway show—astonishes as Marjorie, an impish 85-year-old with dementia using a much younger version of her husband Walter (an uncanny yet tender Christopher Lowell) to regain and retain her memory. Marjorie’s daughter Tess (the incredible Cynthia Nixon) is skeptical and fearful of the technology, whereas Tess’s husband Jon, played by a standout Danny Burstein, is a fan—until an on-the-nose change of heart in the penultimate scene. 

Marjorie Prime’s central flaw is that it favors concepts over dramatic depth. The characters are well-acted but underdeveloped, and almost all they do is talk; the biggest event may be Marjorie urinating herself. Yet, despite its slow pace and formulaic structure, Marjorie Prime is intelligent and poignant. 

Marjorie’s memories are embellished and sanitized for her comfort and convenience. The fallibility of memory is hardly a novel concept, but the Primes enable this reconstructive process and also become a stand-in for genuine connection in the wake of grief, preventing the family from confronting painful realities and repairing their relationships.  

By the time the truth fully surfaces in the unsettling final scene, which makes adroit use of a stage turntable (props to scenic designer Lee Jellinek), there are no humans left to heal. When storytelling is delegated to AI, truth becomes archival rather than relational; however, truth must be witnessed between living people in order to be ethically and therapeutically meaningful.  

Playwright Jordan Harrison’s Primes, like flesh-and-blood clinicians, absorb and co-construct patients’ accounts of self, yet they are disembodied, unfeeling, and ultimately unable to act with compassion, turning dynamic stories into datasets.   

Marjorie Prime, through Feb. 15 at the Helen Hayes Theater in New York; 2st.com/shows/marjorie-prime.  

“Much of healthcare happens in interpersonal moments,” write Maura Spiegel and Danielle Spencer in the first chapter of The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine—and machines are good at many things, but participating in a truly interpersonal moment is likely not one of them. Several studies have suggested that models perform worse for underrepresented groups because they are trained on datasets that lack racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity. Additionally, AI may miss subtle emotional cues and fail to interpret tone, context, and metaphors, which, one bioethicist [1] predicts, could “fundamentally alter” how trust is practiced in healthcare. Others [2] have underscored that “AI should be viewed not as a replacement for the physician, but as a partner in delivering empathetic, patient-centered care.” 

However, AI is not wholly bad. For example, a recent systematic review [3] found that applying natural language processing (NLP) to unstructured text in electronic health records (EHRs) can detect signs of cognitive impairment. Some [4] have found solace in text-based simulations with lost loved ones. And perhaps technology should be viewed as a vehicle for strengthening partnerships between clinicians and patients. Designed by Gabriela Gomes, the video game Healing Spaces aims to help those with neurodegenerative diseases connect with their caregivers. It is a multisensory experience: an app with beach and forest scenes, and a box with aromatherapy that smells like pine trees. Healing Spaces may evoke memories or even create new ones between caregiver and patient, unlike the Primes’ hollow curation. 

Healing Spaces also includes sunscreen-scented lotion that caregivers can use to massage the hands of those in their care. Needless to say, holograms and lotion don’t pair well. “You can’t touch a hologram. So there’s something about them looking so much like your loved ones, but not being able to quite achieve intimacy with them,” said Harrison during Marjorie Prime’s Off-Broadway run about a decade ago. “The loneliness can never be quite extinguished, never satisfied, because they’re just pixels.”  

[1] Kerasidou, Angeliki. “Artificial Intelligence and the Ongoing Need for Empathy,  Compassion and Trust in Healthcare.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization, vol. 98, no. 4, 2020, pp. 245-250. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7133472/. 

[2] Ghenimi, Nadirah, et al. “Integrating AI with Narrative-Based Medicine: Enhancing Patient-Centered Care in Primary Practice.” Perspectives in Primary Care, 5 Dec. 2024, info.primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/perspectives/articles/integrating-ai-with-narrative-based-medicine.  

[3] Shankar, Ravi et al. “Natural Language Processing of Electronic Health Records for Early Detection of Cognitive Decline: A Systematic Review.”npj Digital Medicine, vol. 8, no. 1, 2025, p. 133. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40025194/. 

[4] Fagone, Jason. “The Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of A.I.” The San Francisco Chronicle, 23 July 2021, sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation-artificial-intelligence/. 

Web image from 2nd Street Theater.

For more than twenty years, Dr. K worked in a hot town in the Middle East yet never got to know or understand its people. His only friend was a troubled hospital anesthetist, Biju. Dr. K was employed by the local hospital and assigned to the Accident and Emergency department. The hospital administrator, Sir Farhad (a man Dr. K feared and revered) was an enigmatic figure of authority. Dr. K was obsessed with accumulating wealth. When Farhad offered him an opportunity to earn extra money, Dr. K had no qualms accepting the new part-time position: punishment-surgeon. He would supervise criminal sentences requiring physical mutilation that were imposed by a judge. 

Biju sarcastically told his friend, “You are at the cutting edge of your profession, Dr. K” (111). Yet there was no humor or humanity at presiding over the amputation of the hands of a father-son team of thieves or a maid convicted of stealing jewelry who underwent a similar clinical maiming. The hospital routinely accepted these “punishment cases” referred from the Corrections department and constructed a special operating theatre on the top floor for these “special ops.” Over a decade, Dr. K figured his involvement in this injurious punishment amounted to at least twenty cases.  

Raucous Biju gets accused and convicted of stealing drugs from the hospital. His penalty was removal of a hand. Dr. K pleaded on behalf of Biju with the hospital administrator but to no avail. Dr. K was not convinced of Biju’s guilt and would not participate in the amputation of his friend’s hand. Dr. K resigned his post as punishment-surgeon and eventually settled in England with plenty of money for a comfortable albeit lonely life.  

This disturbing and at times dastardly story displays more than a slight hint of Franz Kafka’s influence including the brutal application of “justice” and a byzantine bureaucracy. Even the physician-narrator’s nickname, Dr. K, appears to be a nod to Kafka.  

The novel illustrates the personal and professional downward spiral that can occur when empathy and morality are subjugated to the pursuit of wealth and status. The story raises troubling questions about the participation of doctors in the legal system’s punishment of criminals.  

The reliability of the narrator is tenuous. He may be in denial or perhaps his memory has grown fragile and corrupted. Remorse seems mostly absent. The story warns of the preponderance of lies we tell – to oneself and to others. Dr. K will not be mistaken for a model doctor or a good man. He has participated in hideous acts of cruelty, been an absent father, and placed the acquisition of money as his main priority. The opening line of the novel is a blunt confession and a succinct conclusion: “I did it for money” (3).

Tell Her Everything
Mirza Waheed
Melville House, Brooklyn, NY, 2022: 234 pages 
A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database. 
Web image by Medhum.org

Book Launch at the Lahore Literary Festival: 

The story begins abruptly. A woman named June is driving westward alone in her car, destination unknown. She is trying desperately to escape the small town near Litchfield, Connecticut where she grew up, after the funerals for four people who have died in a lethal housefire — her ex-husband Adam, her boyfriend Luke, her daughter Lolly, and her daughter’s fiancé Will. The tragedy is compounded by the timing of the fire, the night before the scheduled wedding of June’s daughter.  

In a format that is increasingly common in current literature, the story unfolds from the unique perspective of people connected in various ways to those who perished and those who survived the disaster. The gallery of characters includes June, Lolly, Luke’s mother Lydia, the lesbian couple who own the seaside hotel where June hides out, the Native American woman who cleans the rooms in the hotel, Will’s parents, and a fidgety, socially awkward adolescent who has an unhealthy fixation on Lydia. Each chapter is told from the vantage point of one person, in their voice, in their thoughts. The narrative is in the first person except for the chapters that recount June and Lydia’s experience. There is minimal dialogue, mostly stream of consciousness story telling. Insight emerges from the action. The chapters weave together seamlessly, and you feel yourself drawn more and more into this microcosm of people struggling to make sense of a senseless tragedy. It would be a category error to call the novel a page turner. But there is a profound mystery at the core of the story, an appreciation of the ineffable wonder at how our lives play out and the complexity of our interactions with one another. 

This haunting book incorporates many classic themes that characterize literature that can engage us – the pain of the sudden loss of loved ones, loneliness, regret for mistakes made and actions not taken. It  echoes Tolstoy’s notion that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Were it even simply a tale of coping with heartbreak and learning from life’s catastrophes, this would be a notable book. But there is an unexpected element that emerges from the prose that raises this novel to another level and makes it truly worth reading. 

Amid the grief and wreckage of personal stories, June and Lydia’s stories gradually move to the narrative center. Each one is wracked with guilt and remorse for ill-thought-out actions that caused a loved one profound emotional pain and hurt. Faced with death of the loved one, they feel powerless to get past  their feelings of worthlessness and shame. But as the story gradually unfolds and moves inexorably to its conclusion, each woman becomes more acutely aware of what she has done and is willing to accept responsibility. This self-knowledge culminates in a moment of genuine forgiveness and a sense of rebirth, 

In the Jewish tradition, forgiveness for sins must be preceded by a verbal recognition of wrongdoing, regret for what has been done, and a public resolve to avoid doing the same thing again if the opportunity to sin presents itself in the future. But there is a wrinkle depending on the nature of the sin. If it is directed to God, confession and repentance are enough to wipe the slate clean. But for sins committed against people, confession and repentance alone are insufficient. True forgiveness and closure are not achieved until forgiveness is granted by the person who was injured. Did You Ever Have a Family? describes and captures this interpersonal healing process in lyrical prose. Moreover, the sense of rebirth that animates the climax of the novel recapitulates the Jewish notion that a person who achieves genuine repentance after committing a sin is a new person, completely different than the person who committed the crime.  

There have been recent books like A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet that create a storyline that incorporates biblical elements. Did you ever have a family?’ is different. The architecture of the novel and its human voices are unequivocally modern. But the deeper structure has a profoundly religious sensibility; it grapples with spiritual themes and ideas normally taken up in non-secular settings. The book is infused with a heartfelt intensity that is unusual in contemporary fiction. I’m sure the author would be gratified to know that his book has beautifully articulated the regenerative power of forgiveness in a manner that transcends the bounds of plain fiction.  

Did You Ever Have a Family? 
Bill Clegg 
Reviewed by Howard Trachtman 
Simon & Schuster, Inc 
Published 2015 
Paperback version, Scout Press, 2016, pp291 
Web Photo by Norbert Buduczki