This is a fascinating, moving piece of memoir. We admired the masterly sequencing of the reader’s experience, from evocative scene to background and back to scene. But the background is also plot: Brown the character compulsively gathers information; it’s part of her quest to help her daughter heal. Brown the writer uses this information-gathering as part of the story, and as a way to give readers lots of useful background about a complex and difficult disease.

The piece is a study in parenting—and also an unusual look at food and sustenance, a new, eye-opening view.

Read “One Spoonful at a Time,” by Harriet Brown

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