I’m new to Jo Ann Beard and so glad to have discovered the American essayist. She’s a compassionate, empathic, clear sighted writer of ‘Cheri’, a novella, that tells the story of the final few weeks of a woman dying of cancer. It’s beautiful. When I finished reading it, I read it again. It is clinical, stark. The imagery of being under ice that links the beginning and the end is haunting.

“She breathes slowly in the narrow pocket of air, and the children in their bright skates congregate above her head. She lingers there for a moment, her cheek pressed against the underside of the ice, a hand reaches down and pushes her under.”

I recommend ‘Cheri’, always with the caveat that you might cry. It feels all too real. It is.

First published in the US as ‘Undertaker, Please Drive Slow’ in Am I Blue? in Tin House, issue no. 12, summer 2002, and as ‘Cheri’ in Festival Days, Little, Brown, 2021. Published as a standalone novella in the UK by Serpent’s Tail, 2023