Home Is Burning

An Entertainment Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year: “A heartwarming, profane memoir about humor and resilience in the face of tragedy.” —People

For the Marshalls, laughter is the best medicine. Especially when combined with alcohol, pain pills, excessive cursing, sexual escapades, actual medicine, and more alcohol.

At twenty-five, Dan Marshall has a good job, a great girlfriend, and a dream life in sunny Los Angeles without a care in the world. Until, one boozy, beachy day, his phone blows up. It turns out the cancer his mom had battled throughout his childhood with tenacity and a mouth foul enough to make a sailor blush is back. And to add insult to injury, his loving father has been diagnosed with ALS. Sayonara L.A., Dan is headed home to Salt Lake City, Utah.

His older sister is resentful, having stayed closer to home to bear the brunt of their mother’s illness. His younger brother comes to lend a hand, giving up a journalism career and evenings cruising Chicago gay bars. His two younger sisters are preoccupied, respectively, with 1) rebellion and 2) ballet. Dan returns to dinner-table shouting matches, old flames knocking at the door, and a speech device programmed to help his father communicate that’s as crude as the rest of them. But they put their petty differences aside, form Team Terminal, and do the best they can. Which isn’t great.

As Dan steps into his role as caregiver, wheelchair wrangler, and sibling referee, he watches pieces of his previous life slip away—and comes to realize that the further you stretch the ties that bind, the tighter they hold you together.

“In this impressive debut, Marshall evokes sympathy, but never pity, as he conveys his family’s pain through fart jokes, farcical misadventures (sexual and medical), and—in the middle of all the confusion—emotion so raw and potent it’s almost jarring . . . a must-read.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)