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The thing about chronic illness is that life doesn’t stop. It continues its messy, difficult, joyful, out-of-your-control spinning right around you. Kathryn Trueblood’s new book Take Daily As Needed captures it all, then weaves it together to show how every bit of your life is interconnected and affected by all the other parts.

Recently, I found an opportunity through Chronic Illness Bloggers to read and review Take Daily As Needed. I jumped on it. So much in it resonated — chronic illness, food allergies, feminism, relationships, and parenting our parents. To be clear, I haven’t read any of Kathryn’s other books, but I will now — it was that good an experience.

The book is fiction, the story of Maeve Beaufort. Each chapter is a stand-alone, independent story, focusing on different relationships and situations within Maeve’s life and together, they build to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The book begins with a chapter primarily about her daughter Noelle`s food allergies, showing the cracks beginning to form in Maeve’s marriage, which are often related to the gentle, at first subtle, then sometimes strong drift from feminist to traditionalist that some men experience once children come along. Other chapters dive deep into the drastic changes in life once you`re diagnosed with a chronic illness (Chrohn’s, in Maeve’s case) and how it affects everything — your ability to parent, children’s rebellion, and the fear of showing your true reality to someone with whom you’d like to spend the rest of your life. There are chapters on caregiving for elderly parents, a darkly hilarious story of Maeve honouring her mother’s last wishes, beautiful and difficult moments between Maeve and her son and how they learn to navigate their relationship around her chronic illness and his Asperger’s (and general teenage angst). And so much more, but you’ll have to read the book to discover that.

The technique of telling Maeve’s story in consecutive short stories is inspired and works so very well. Each story is like an entire book in how it perfectly catches a relationship – how it grew, how it scarred, how it loved. And how Trueblood tells it is beautiful.

I am a dedicated word nerd and have been known to swoon over a perfectly crafted sentence. And this book has many such moving and evocative pearls. Such as, “I open the window and smell something flinty in the fall air, like pencil shavings,” and “a girl named Janie, who wanted to be liked so bad it hurt to look into her face,” and “But she did not touch him in affection, not for three years, until one day he said something so funny, she walked toward him laughing, and he simply opened his arms.” I could go on, devoting an entire post to sentences that made me suck in a breath, laugh, brought tears to my eyes, and melted my heart.

This is a book about a woman’s journey and her journey with chronic illness. It’s about big thoughts and philosophies – feminism, ableism, how to parent in the midst of illness, how to take care of others, how to allow yourself to be dependent. It’s about the life lessons we all go through, we all have to learn, and in the telling, it serves as entertainer and teacher both.

I highly recommend this wonderful book. You can buy Take Daily as Needed on Amazon and other booksellers. More information about the author and her other books are on Kathryn Trueblood’s website.