I started this months ago (as an ARC from NetGalley) and almost immediately put it down for a good long while. I knew it would be great, but, having lost my own dad very recently, I just wasn't in a place to read it. When I picked it back up, it still was a hard read for me, because Chung does such a good job sharing her grief.

More than the exploration of grief, Chung's discussion of class in America -- the difference between middle class and working class (which calls itself middle class), the precarity so many families live in, the disastrous effects of our broken health care system -- is impressive. This is an important perspective.

- My goodness, is A LIVING REMEDY a powerful book. It boils over with rage and love. It brings the reader along the confusing, overwhelming path of grief.
- Chung meanders between the present day and memories of her childhood, giving us a full picture of who her parents were and the bond she had with them. Her writing is to the point, but always thoughtful.
- For me, I am grateful that this book shows that strange pre-grief period, when you know a loved one is dying but they're still here, and there isn't much you can do about anything. It's a strange, though common, situation that our society and our health care system don't really know how to deal with.

As a Korean adoptee to white parents in a majority-white Oregon town, Nicole Chung was excited to leave her hometown for college and move across the country. She found her community and home on the East Coast as her family grew after graduation. However, when both her parents passed away within a year of each other–her father from diabetes & kidney disease and her mother from cancer during the pandemic–Chung was hit with heartbreaking grief and rage.

A LIVING REMEDY is a heartwrenching and poignant memoir that explores identity, family, and inequality. As an adoptee who grew up in a white family, Chung grapples with her difference from her parents yet also cherishes the closeness they share. She reflects on her parents' courageous decision to adopt a sick Korean American baby. This experience gives Chung the courage to pursue whatever she wants in life and is a testament to her parents' legacy.

Chung also delves into issues of poverty and healthcare and how these issues are intertwined to contribute to the struggles of middle-class families that rely on stable jobs to afford medical care. As someone who lived in Taiwan, where there is universal healthcare, and finds America's medical system baffling, I resonated deeply with Chung's experience and pain when her father couldn't access adequate care due to financial instability.

Perhaps most heartbreakingly, Chung memorializes her parents and grapples with the question of how to care for them when she's across the country and how to remember them after they're gone. I sobbed so much reading about this and thinking about my parents, who are an ocean away. While I'm grateful for their support of me pursuing my career in the US, I shudder to think if there's ever an emergency and I couldn't be there with my parents. Will I ever forgive myself?

A LIVING REMEDY is a beautifully written memoir that explores complex themes with grace and honesty. Chung's story is one that resonated deeply with me, and I'll be thinking about it long after finishing.

So heartbreakingly good. I loved Nicole’s first book about her adoption and this book was just as beautifully written. She truly makes you feel the struggle her family endures, it was so eye opening. With that struggle is a story of deep love, it was beautiful.

I'm in awe of Chung's ability to see her emotions, digest them and assess them in a way that she can write about them. Her first book was excellent, especially in this aspect and same in A Living Remedy. She writes with compassion and honesty about her family, her feelings, and with valid and righteous anger about the health care system in the US.

I am better for reading this memoir! I have experienced a lot of loss over the past few years. This memoir made me feel that I wasn't alone in my grief. It was the most therapeutic book I have ever read.

A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung is a beautifully written memoir. The author shares both her struggles and successes as an adopted Korean child raised by white parents in a small white community in Oregon. It is only after Nicole Chung graduates from high school and receives a scholarship to a small private college on the east coast that she finds a sense of community. As the story of her career, marriage, and children unfolds, we become aware of the differences in her middle class life compared to her parents’ experiences. In their experience, there is no safety net and the cost of health care is unaffordable. Nicole Chung writes from her heart as she describes how financial instability contributed to the death of her father in his 60’s. When her mother suffers from a diagnosis of cancer shortly before the pandemic begins, we share in the author’s frustration of not being there for her mom as much as she wanted to be. Although we feel the author’s heartbreaks in her life, we also get a sense of her strength and the support she receives from her husband and two children as well as from the special bond she has with her mother. I highly recommend this book to readers of memoirs. Her story will resonate in parts with your own life. Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.,

This is the story of Nicole Chung losing her parents far too young to illnesses that might not have killed them if medical care was more easily accessible in the United States (at least more accessible if you're not rich, if you work from hard all your life but never have security). The writing is assured and honest--it is easy to trust Chung as your guide to the underworld, as she describes the way her family's losses begin, and that trust is never betrayed.

I thought it might be hard or even impossible to read. I also lost my mother when, due to covid, I could not be with her; I completely recognize the horrible, suspended waiting and the slow trickle of terrible news through phone calls that never bring you close enough. I also know the endlessly calculated, never sufficient balancing act when your children and your parents both need you, and you cannot possibly manage to do it all, let alone do it and take care of yourself. Instead, I found it impossible to put down--Chung finds words for so much I could not describe to other people. Her description of the frantic, deranging landscape of grief is equally apt. So much of grief is isolating (even as Chung explains from her own family members who are also grieving). It was an incredible relief to see someone else across those gray plains.

This memoir will be equally accessible to those who have not yet lost a parent, but it is absolutely vital for those who have. It also offers a necessary window for the adult adoptee as Chung continues to navigate her relationship with both her adoptive and birth families.

Thanks to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for the free earc I received in exchange for an honest review.

“A Living Remedy” by Nicole Chung is a story of grief. It is a moving and emotional tribute to the author’s parents, who died within a few years of each other. It is a story of loss and a story of love.

The title comes from a poem by Marie Howe entitled “For Three Days”:
“…because fear has its own language
and its own story, because even grief provides a living remedy…”

Chung, the author, lost her father fairly suddenly and unexpectedly. She had known that he had been diagnosed with a serious medical condition, but no one had expected him to die so soon.

Then, only a couple of years later, Chung’s mother died of cancer. This loss was especially devastating because Chung, who lived on the East coast, was not able to travel to see her mother in Oregon due to strict Covid restrictions.

So Chung could not be with her mother at the time of her death, nor was she able to attend the funeral. This made her intense grief even harder to bear.

This is a memoir, and it is very much a testament of Chung’s thoughts and feelings as she tries to cope with the illnesses of her parents and then with their deaths.

She recounts her childhood and how and why she chose to attend college, and ultimately to make her permanent home, three thousand miles away from the town where she grew up and where her parents still lived.

She touches on her adoption as a Korean baby by a Caucasian couple and the effects of the adoption on her life. She experienced some bullying as a child and a sense of not completely belonging throughout her life, but she never doubted the love of her adoptive parents.

She shows the love she had for her parents and tells of a generally happy childhood. But she also talks about living in a family that was under financial strain, a family that never had extra and sometimes didn’t have enough.

Her parents often did not have health insurance, and when they did they still felt they couldn’t afford to go to the doctor except in times of urgent need. They did not get preventative care or regular checkups, and because of this, her father was already seriously ill by the time his condition was diagnosed.

She points out how expensive medical care is for a middle class family. Even end-of-life care is costly, and the family was barely able to cover the bills.

This lovely book is sad but beautiful. Chung is a talented writer and her story is compelling. The themes of love, illness, death and acceptance make this a recommended book for everyone. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️, available April 4, 2023.

My thanks to the author, Nicole Chung, to the publisher, Ecco Press, and to NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book.

#ALivingRemedy #eccobooks #netgalley

For anyone whose parents have passed in the last few years, this book will be both reassuring and painful. Chung is adept at examining her feelings in the unique context of her life. Her life differs so greatly from that of her adoptive parents; it gives her the opportunity to address all sorts of issues.
It's a fairly quick read and a good book for our times. One can practically feel a follow-up brewing.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. I predict it will be read by many!

This book is going to stay with me for a long time and I've already preordered copies for a couple of people in my life who could really use it. Nicole Chung is such a gifted writer and I loved her previous memoir, but somehow I think I may love this one even more. The way she writes about grief, family, anxiety, and choosing to live is truly incredible. I sobbed my way through more than half of this book, simultaneously feeling like she was sharing her story broadly and talking directly to me and connecting on my own experiences. This is a must read.

Where Nicole Chung's previous book, All You Can Ever Know, revolved around her search for and reconnection with her birth parents, A Living Remedy focuses on her adoptive parents and the loss of each. The death of a parent is always going to be a source of great grief, and the death of both within a short window can feel unimaginable. Chung navigates her double griefs in the wake of the pandemic, understanding her loss in the context of a much greater loss that will take us lifetimes to mourn, even as people try to move on. Specifically in the context of Americans, we can see how many people have chosen to look away from the pandemic and death altogether, but Chung looks head-on at her great losses, considering her relationship with each of her parents and how they inform her approach to parenting her own young children. As with her previous book, Chung thinks long and deep about family, making room for both grief and joy, sometimes all at once.

That’s two for two for me and this author. I adored this just as much as her previous book and it struck me right in my grief feelings.

What a beautiful story of love, grief, loss, family, acceptance, class and faith.

This was deeply intimate and will bring you to tears. A reminder of the pandemic and how many people struggled with not being with their loved ones at the end of life. Also, how frustrating the division of healthcare is for those that simply can’t afford it.

Chung has given us a gift with her stories and i have no doubt her parents are beaming down with pride from heaven.

Remarkably raw, nothing held back, this is an exquisitely written and painful look through the eyes of a transracial adoptee’s experience growing up with loving parents but tormented by racism outside of her family. It is also the story of a young, married woman’s struggles during the pandemic, as she becomes a mother, her parents succumb to unrelated illnesses and a failing health care system and how she copes with losing them both.

If you’ve read her previous memoir ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW, you know a bit about her history. Chung’s determination to get an education was her ticket out. But getting ahead also meant taking her physically farther away from them. During the pandemic, no less. Creating a distance so vast between the author and her parents, now living on opposite coasts. Money was tight and she couldn’t be by their side as her father succumbed to kidney failure and her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Chung illuminates the glaring inequality that financial instability brings. What her memoir does is shorten that wide expanse allowing her to express her grief and love for her parents.

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Collins for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Nicole Chung built a different life for herself as an adult than the community in which she was raised by her white adoptive parents, a working class Evangelical neighborhood in the Pacific Northwest where Nicole was the only Korean person she knew. But when Chung's parents grew sick one after the other, she had to provide the best support she could from across the country while also grappling with all the things that separated them and still held them together.

This emotional, deeply personal memoir addresses universal issues like class and religious differences, grief, and the way family and loss shape us. Nicole Chung beautifully memorializes the parents who raised her lovingly, although not always with the resources they needed, and shares the heartbreaking choices she had to make at the ends of their lives. It's a moving follow-up to her debut, All You Can Ever Know.

What a gift it was to read this memoir, truly. The way she tells her story and that of her parents was extremely sad and emotional but I was drawn by how well it was written. How do you encapsulate someone’s grief? The short answer is, you don’t. Grief is something that is ever-changing, evolving and is extremely personal. She feels less safe in the world due to what happened with her parents. She judges her actions in order to reconcile something that is incomprehensible. The guilt and regret she feels was overpowering:

"The regret and anger I bear is a constant ache, fierce and gnawing and deep, so entwined with my grief that I cannot begin to parse where one feeling ends and another begins."

What she has experienced carries with it an unimaginable weight of anxiety, hopelessness and grief that is palpable on every page. You just hope that she is able to, at some point in time, find some semblance of peace. Thank you Nicole Chung for sharing this beautifully written story.

What a poignant memoir. Nicole Chung did a spectacular job of not just describing her parents, but her unique relationship with them, both as a unit and as individuals (especially her mom). She's a superb writer.

I will say I expected - based on the blurb - that we'd be hearing more from Nicole about the early stages of her life ("When Nicole Chung graduated from high school, she couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough..."), so I had a little bit of trouble getting oriented in the first third of the book because I kept waiting for that deep-dive into her childhood. Once I got settled, though, I found it completely absorbing (not to mention gut-wrenching).

Loss is part of life, and life isn't fair, but Nicole and her family experienced some especially brutal losses in a short period of time - made even more horrible by COVID. I valued how her experiences illustrated so personally the completely unjustifiable health discrepancies and failures of our safety nets in this country. At times, though, I found myself wishing for broader context to help hammer home that, rage-inducingly, her family's experience was the norm when it should be the exception (kind of in the half-personal half-political style of Meghan O'Rourke's Invisible Kingdom).

Thanks to Ecco and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest feedback.

I love Nicole Chung’s writing. Her memoirs are so vulnerable and poignant. hee recollection of the passing of her parents, each with a terminal diagnosis while she lived across the country was at times heartbreaking but always beautiful.

Author Nicole Chung reflects on her life growing up in Southern Oregon as an adoptee and Asian American. She takes readers through her relationship with her parents and explores the binds she has with her family through both hood and bad times.

Nicole Chung has followed up her 2018 memoir, "All You Can Ever Know" with "A Living Remedy," bringing the reader close to walk through her experience of losing both parents and a grandmother within a few short years. She resists the easy parsing out of guilt and responsibility for pain, choosing instead to simply name the places where systems failed and perfect personal choices didn't exist. I appreciated her carefully nuanced writing about motherhood, daughterhood, early adulthood, religion, and the covid pandemic. Chung writes with respect and humility, making her a trustworthy companion through even difficult emotional landscapes.

While this book holds a lot of difficult stories, there's a thread of love and compassionate understanding woven throughout. I finished my reading with a sense of gratitude for all that holds us together and a commitment to continue strengthening those bonds.

Many thanks to Ecco books and NetGalley for a free copy of "A Living Remedy" for review!