Don't Read This Book. Read This Book.

I just read The Best of Us, the new memoir by Joyce Maynard. I first found Maynard when I was 16 and she was 19, when she wrote Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties. I have followed her ever since. The Best of Us is Maynard's account of her life with her husband Jim Barringer: their courtship and marriage in their late 50s, his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, 19 months of treatment, and his death.

Don't read this book. It will break your heart.

Read this book. It will break your heart.

Maynard is, even at her best, a high maintenance individual. She makes it clear in The Best of Us that she can be (and often was) self-centered, demanding, impatient, and a whole host of other less than wonderful characteristics. In the end, she concluded, her husband's cancer and their experiences burned away the dross—the need for constant attention, the need to always have the last word, the needs to be the center of attention, the need to always be right—and brought out the very best in her.

Don't read this book. It will drain you with the ups and downs of their lives as the cancer raged ahead.

Read this book. It will move you by the love and devotion that rose like cream above the nightmare of living with an aggressive cancer.

Two-thirds of the way through The Best of Us, I closed it, looked at Warren, and said, "You cannot read this book. Ever." I was quiet a minute, then said, "Mel [a close friend whose husband has cancer] can't read this book ever either." When Warren asked why, still blinking in surprise at my pronouncement, I added "because it will kill you both."

This book pierced my heart. After finishing it, I threw myself on the bed to think about it. Warren lay down beside me. I thought about what is ahead for both of us. Then I told him I was thinking of the book.

"I'm not surprised."

Then I voiced what has long been in my heart but I have rarely said out loud. "I don't want to leave you."

With that, I started crying. Warren's eyes welled up and tears ran down his face.

"I know you don't."

As I said recently, in the start of an eulogy, all of us are going to die. I know that. But I'm not thinking big universal concepts here. I'm thinking small picture. Personal picture. Our picture.

And that is where The Best of Us triumphs. Maynard's focus is on the small picture, her and her husband's small picture. Because in the end, that's what mattered.

Don't read this book.

Read this book.

Yes, read this book.