Bittersweet Goodbye

Bittersweet Goodbye

VICTORIA REDEL ’80

REDEL, IN HER FOURTH NOVEL, DEFTLY captures the ways in which a dying friend’s final months consume the lives of those unable to accept the prospect of life without her—even as they are forced to deal with challenging issues of their own.

Alternating between present and past, Redel episodically illuminates the intricate bonds of friendship through her portrayal of a group of five 50-something women who grew up together. One character, Anna, enters hospice, shifting the lives of the others and providing a new frame of reference for all the joys and sorrows they’ve experienced together.

The idea for the book grew from a seed planted by a childhood friend of the author, who asked Redel why she’d never written about friendship. After her friend died of cancer, Redel was inspired to set aside a book-inprogress and instead explore and write about love and loss from several perspectives. “The other book became irrelevant,” she says. “I wanted to bear witness to the ongoing process of becoming a person and the various choices people make.”

Redel, a professor at Sarah Lawrence who has also published several collections of poetry, says she has long contemplated her own mortality. She had to grapple with the loss of a close friend soon after college, when classmate Nancy Rockwell ’80 died from a lightning strike while leading an Outward Bound trip. Six months later, Redel’s mother died. “They are still alive to me,” she says.

Before Everything is not gloomy. It is funny, bittersweet, emotional. It celebrates life that is richly lived and how someone can be joyfully remembered rather than mourned. Redel was pleased, she says, when a bereaved publishing friend who admitted he was nervous about reading the book “said it served as a kind of guidebook for him and made him feel better.”

Lisa Furlong