Product details
- ISBN 9780299358044
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 27 Oct 2026
- Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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When her octogenarian poet mother was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, Mary Cappello and her wife moved into the living room of Rosemary's one-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia to help fulfill her wish to live out her life at home. A memoir in the form of lyric essays—with her mother's own writing interspersed—Frost Will Come is a daughter's tribute to her mother's months-long transition from a deeply lived life to a difficult, beautiful, and uneasy death.
In the tradition of Annie Ernaux's I Remain in Darkness and Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death, Cappello renders an immersive and emotionally honest portrait of modern caregiving in a prose style that is the very definition of candor: spontaneous, fresh, unadorned, frank, and open. While paying homage to expert caregivers and medical professionals, Cappello also brings her signature razor-sharp analysis to all the things that fall outside the realm of (medical) knowledge—from platitudes around the time death takes to the defiance of a "peaceful death" as a sign of a moral failing.
Frost Will Come is much more than a memoir of grief. It is a rare reckoning with the very fundamentals of existence: how we come into being, how we care, and how we die.
Mary Cappello is the author of seven books, including the best-selling essay collection Awkward: A Detour. She is a professor emerita of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island.
