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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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FALLING

Elisha Cooper

A Daughter, a Father, and a Journey Back

The award-winning children's book author confronts a new world when faced with his daughter's illness in this frank, moving, and beautiful memoir.
Elisha Cooper spends his mornings writing and illustrating children's books, his afternoons playing with his two daughters. The phrase he hates most is "throw like a girl," so he teaches them to climb trees and play ball. But when he discovers a lump in five-year-old Zoë's midsection as she sits on his lap at a Chicago Cubs game, everything changes.

Surgery, sleepless nights, treatments, a drumbeat of worry. Even as the family moves to New York and Zoë starts kindergarten, they must navigate a new normal: school and soccer games and hot chocolates in cafés regularly interrupted by anxious visits to the hospital. And Elisha is forced to balance his desire to be a protective parent—even as he encourages his girls to take risks—against the increasing helplessness he feels for his child's well-being, and his own.

With the observant eye of an artist and remarkable humor, Elisha writes about what it took for him and his wife to preserve a sense of normalcy and joy in their daughters' lives; how the family emerged from this experience profoundly changed, but healed and whole; how we are all transformed by the fear and hope we feel for those we love.

ELISHA COOPER is the author of Train, Farm, Homer, and, most recently, 8: An Animal Alphabet. His children's book, Beach, won the 2006 Society of Illustrators Gold Medal. Dance! was a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year. Other books include A Year in New York and the memoir Crawling: A Father's First Year. He lives with his family in New York City.
Available products
Book

Published 2016-06-14 by Pantheon

Book

Published 2016-06-14 by Pantheon

Comments

A profoundly moving memoir.

A small, wry, trenchant, immensely moving book. While Cooper's subject is ostensibly his young daughter’s scarifying illness and recovery, in these deft pages he takes on the large themes of risk, responsibility and love—integers of the intricate geometry of family life—with rage and tenderness.

As delicate yet plainspoken as his beautiful picture books, Elisha Cooper’s Falling sketches out, in moving detail, a father’s ultimate ordeal, from the time his young daughter is diagnosed with cancer through the long purgatory of waiting to find out if she will be cured. It’s also a wonderful and often comic account of raising kids amid the quirky vexations and comforts of life in New York City.

A beautiful book that knows so much about love and uncertainty. It knows that life isn’t made of Grand Sweeping Truths but of particular moments--moments of sublimity and irritation, soccer balls kicked into rivers and sandwiches eaten in pediatric oncology wards. This book left me deeply moved, full of admiration, and vibrating with gratitude for the ordinary moments of my own family's life.

Falling is the picture of a man helpless to help a sick child. Cooper’s fear and powerlessness turn into a range of emotions, but ultimately, Falling is about love. This is a book I will never forget. I recommend it to everyone.