Memoirs by grieving parents obviously have some similarities; what makes the best of them unique is each writer’s voice. I was reminded, up to a point, of Jayson Greene’s magnificent memoir about his young daughter’s death, Once More We Saw Stars. But A Heart That Works is a book about grief as only Delaney could write it. Indeed, it is the work of a more mature writer than the one who published his first memoir in 2013 ... Though it will inevitably be described by some as 'raw,' I’d like to pre-emptively disagree. True, the book is lit up with flashes of red-hot fury and despair ... There’s nothing undercooked or unpolished, however, about the captivating spiral narrative Delaney crafts, doling out memories and digressions with precision and modulating the emotional volume with impressive control. He touches on his son’s death, spins away into a poignant contemplation of the invisible burdens of strangers or a profanity-laced swipe at the American health care system, then comes back to his central loss, again and again. Will you cry? Yes, unless you have no soul. You’ll also have space to catch your breath ... And you will laugh, because this book is often miraculously funny...His absurdist’s touch makes otherwise mundane sentences bubble with playfulness ... Even some of the darkest moments are slashed through with light ... That’s another miracle about this book: Whether or not readers relate to the specifics of this father-son relationship — whether or not, say, you have ever had to administer tracheostomy care — it’s impossible not to recognize the joys and heartbreaks of our shared human condition. The word I wrote most frequently in the margins of my copy was, YES ... Humor may provide momentary respite, but what keeps this family afloat throughout the long months of Henry’s illness, hospitalizations and surgeries is their devotion to one another ... may be a tribute to a lost son and the family who survives him; it may be a hand outstretched to bereaved parents who feel alone on their planet of grief; but most of all, it is a hopeful plea to people everywhere to make choices, large and small, guided by love. What a world it would be if we did ... All the more reason this radiant memoir deserves the highest admiration. Knowing he was attempting the impossible, Rob Delaney set out to do it anyway.
From the start, everything is narrated from a present tense in which Henry is already gone; just as in life, where grief explodes and warps time, everything feels incredibly close one second and unbearably far away the next ... The book can feel like a dagger that stabs you again and again ... But we also get some laughs along the way. Alongside the recounting of panicked hospital visits, scary infections, and breathing-tube struggles, there are comic riffs and asides that wouldn’t be out of place in a Delaney standup set, or on his Twitter feed. These two strands—the grief and the laughs—don’t just sit side by side; they work together. When Delaney gets going about the confusing nature of hospital layouts, or his troubles having his American voice understood by a phone menu designed to respond to Brits, it does a few things at once. It’s a momentary reprieve, however partial, from the book’s unalterable trajectory. It’s a formal embodiment of Delaney’s advice, to other parents of severely ill children, about finding opportunities for immediate delight, resisting the power of disease’s shadow to darken everything. It’s funny. Then Delaney yanks you back to grief. You wonder, guiltily, if you latched on to the reprieve a bit too eagerly ... Sometimes these rapid leaps of register coincide, to powerful effect, with Delaney’s swerves through time ... Early on, Delaney says that he knows evoking his experience accurately will hurt people. Therefore, he writes, he wants to hurt people. But he steers clear of easy sentiment. He knows that he’s writing a tearjerker, and is obviously wary of the genre; he doesn’t want Henry’s life to be just a pile of sadness. On first read, it’s easy to overlook just how strenuously he avoids barraging the reader with details of Henry’s suffering. It’s there, to be sure, but we learn just as much—maybe more—about his passions and enthusiasms: the relationships he made in the hospital, the TV shows and music he liked; his connections with his family members; the dancing and play that filled their apartment when he came home. The pain comes less from horrifying details than from the way Delaney lures us into contact with the very aspects of our lives that are easiest to ignore: our fragilities, our constant proximity to calamity, our powerlessness to control what life brings, or when ... All along, the jokes keep coming, letting you laugh, sometimes just to laugh, and sometimes so you can hurt more, the laughter and the hurt getting increasingly tangled, long past the point where it would be possible to prise them apart.
To those who have felt the icy grip of grief around their own throats, it is a relief to read an account of grief that is not a series of hard-won life lessons wrapped in a gratitude journal ... There is no making sense of the senseless, and Delaney doesn’t attempt to ... The result is a book that sings with life: not just Henry’s abbreviated one but the lives of the people who loved him, who love him, who will continue to love him ... That a book about a dead child is at times laugh-out-loud funny is a testament to Delaney’s skill; in the hands of a lesser writer, the humor could seem dismissive or grasping instead of the natural release valve of a person who is highly attuned to the absurdity of the awful.
... it gives me great pleasure, and no pleasure at all, to write that Rob Delaney’s new book is both overwhelmingly moving and, in any other way you might assess a book, excellent ... It is unbearable, in the sense that the situation Delaney and his family find themselves in – the pain he describes wittily, unflinchingly, confrontationally – is greater than most of us have yet to bear, and try not to allow ourselves to contemplate ... And yet it is, as one might imagine, vital and very, very funny ... Most moving, though, are Delaney’s descriptions of the privilege of care. People don’t appreciate just how addictively wonderful it is to help someone you love, however exhausting, however devastating ... as much as I wish he hadn’t had to write it, I am glad he did. Because such deaths do happen. And they largely happen in private. The reality of medical care, especially social and palliative care, is often shrouded in silence ... as much as Delaney is writing to offer succour and companionship to people who have experienced something similar, he is also rallying those who haven’t to understand and listen, and to chisel away at the stigma of pain. That he is able to do so with such guiltless, funny and disarming honesty is testament to the profound effect of Henry’s short but meaningful life.
... less funny than it is outright phenomenal. Serving as a written act of grief, Delaney delves into the tragic death of his 2½-year-old son in 2018 with a book that is likely to find itself on many best-of-the-year lists next month ... Written with empathy and remarkable humor ... Written in beautiful prose that occasionally veers into justifiable rage, Delaney’s words are rich with sorrow while also managing the even more astonishing feat of often being legitimately funny ... Doled out in appropriate doses, Delaney’s gift of levity is a necessary balm to consume a text that is often, undeniably, quite heavy ... Ultimately, it’s a memoir written as an act of therapy that will now further honor its subject’s legacy by providing a new source of clear-eyed, empathetic comfort for those who need it most.
Heartbreaking, consoling, funny and angry, it also works as lament, all of its threads pulled tight by the one strong metaphor of drowning that forms its backbone ... the brightest star of all is Henry because this is also a love story ... has many stories packed tightly around its central narrative, its almost unbearable evocation of grief and love barely held in check by Delaney’s authorial voice, which somehow knows when to withhold even though he frequently lashes out with often comic effect. Comedy and poetry feed on loss — in both forms, brevity and timing are vital ... In the last quarter of this life-changing book, I encountered one of the loneliest passages I’ve ever read ... Every parent dreads a child’s death but if we haven’t experienced it, we can’t imagine it: this slim volume brings us far closer than we could possibly have imagined.
What a relief it is that the memoir of Rob Delaney is excellent: tender, perceptive and strangely, darkly funny amid unconscionable tragedy...I’m not sure how I’d have reviewed the writing down of such intimate grief had it not been good, but fortunately it is. Very ... Delaney’s heartache is visceral and violent ... There were often moments reading this book when I had to look away and cry. But Delaney is acutely aware that this will be the case ... there is such radical honesty that this book will be a comfort to anyone experiencing emotions they worry are somehow inappropriate in the face of grief ... This is a rallying call against the polite timidity that we often show grief. It is a howl into the dark. But this is also a story of immense love. The affection and support Delaney shares with his wife and sons, as they live between hospitals and from MRI to MRI, is wonderful to read about.
Unspeakably admirable ... Delaney recounts the ordeal in searingly honest terms, conveying the intricate cobweb of emotions he experienced ... There are parcels of advice amid his frank, razor-sharp writing as well.
A devastatingly candid account of a parent’s grief that will have readers laughing and crying in equal measure ... Delaney is no stranger to balancing grief and humor, and it shows in this heartbreaking yet often darkly funny recounting of how he lost his third son, Henry, to brain cancer. The author’s work as a writer and actor in the dramedy series Catastrophe clearly primed him to share these poignant recollections. Few would attempt to bring humor and levity to such an unbearably sad story, but Delaney manages to do so with grace, sincerity, and warmth. His ability to weave laughter into something so dark also makes the book accessible for a wide audience, as the author gives readers permission to fully absorb his family’s story, to empathize and understand, without having to remain straight-faced and downcast. Throughout, Delaney includes playful but sincere asides ... a tender tale of how a family can remain loving and connected during and after tragedy, and Delaney pulls no punches in highlighting his own perceived shortcomings as a father and husband throughout the unimaginable ordeal. His raw honesty and ability to inject humor into the narrative are both charming and refreshing ... A heart-wrenching and impressively self-aware story of a father living through the death of his young child.
