Intervals

Starred review from July 15, 2024
Brooker debuts with a searing meditation on end-of-life care that traces her mother’s primary progressive multiple sclerosis from her diagnosis in 2009 to her death 10 years later. After Brooker’s mother, Jane, learned of her condition “on the cusp of forty and a harsh decade of austerity” in the U.K., she “made a workshop of herself,” constructing her own wigs and dentures when her hair and teeth fell out, both out of financial necessity and as a means of maintaining her dignity (a word Brooker regards “with mild suspicion” as it relates to the dying, since it “has nothing of the chaos that makes us human”). As she recounts her mother’s dalliances with various methods of coping with her diagnosis, including tarot readings and appointments with a death doula, Brooker casts a critical eye toward the funding cuts that accelerated at least 335,000 deaths in England, Scotland, and Wales between 2012 and 2019, according to one study, and highlights how low-income patients like her mother “live in the spaces between programs and policies and laws that do and don’t work for those who need them most.” She also constructs an indelible portrait of her tenacious mother, who died after she voluntarily stopped eating and drinking. With breathtaking precision and piercing moral clarity, Brooker delivers a brilliant blend of memoir and cultural critique that’s likely to reshape readers’ ideas about death and dying.