When her octogenarian poet mother was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, Mary Cappello and her wife moved into the living room of Rosemary's one-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia to help fulfill her wish to live out her life at home. A memoir in the form of lyric essays-with her mother's own writing interspersed-Frost Will Come is a daughter's tribute to her mother's months-long transition from a deeply lived life to a difficult, beautiful, and uneasy death. In the tradition of Annie Ernaux's I Remain in Darkness and Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death, Cappello renders an immersive and emotionally honest portrait of modern caregiving in a prose style that is the very definition of candor: spontaneous, fresh, unadorned, frank, and open. While paying homage to expert caregivers and medical professionals, Cappello also brings her signature razor-sharp analysis to all the things that fall outside the realm of (medical) knowledge-from platitudes around the time death takes to the defiance of a "peaceful death" as a sign of a moral failing. Frost Will Come is much more than a memoir of grief. It is a rare reckoning with the very fundamentals of existence: how we come into being, how we care, and how we die.
Mary Cappello is the author of seven books, including the best-selling essay collection Awkward: A Detour. She is a professor emerita of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island.
I Variations II Explanations III Tempos IV Unanswerables V Dreams VI Explications VII Scenes VIII Reckonings Epilogue: R. Cappello, Bio Appendix: R. Cappello, "What Is Poetry?" Notes List of Illustrations Acknowledgments and Sources
"Cappello demands not so much that we see her mother as that we not look away from her arduous passing. In this intricate filigree of language and occasional bright beads of images, Cappello comes perhaps as close as it's possible to get to the threshold without crossing over oneself." - Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic "Reading Mary Cappello, I feel the physical location of my heart move. It doesn't sit back in my chest anymore but has edged forward, closer to the world. This rearrangement only happens on those rarest of occasions when the reader says to the author, 'The way you write, think, look, live. . . . I trust you with my life.'" - Maria Tumarkin, author of Axiomatic "A beautiful and devastating work, darkly illuminating, filled with wisdom and sorrow and wonder. Palpable grief and love infuse every page. Cappello is our perfect guide as she traverses with fortitude and grace this most sacred terrain. A devotion like no other. Exceptional." - Carole Maso, author of Mother and Child: A Novel "Cappello offers the whole of her mother's life so we can feel the entirety of her death. Both elegy and homage, Frost Will Come is capacious in its honesty and grief, longing and astonishment." - Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl "Frost Will Come chronicles the passing of the author's mother, larger-than-life artist and poet Rosemary Cappello. Cappello's frank, gorgeous prose mirrors the gritty beauty she finds in the death of this vital spirit. A stunning achievement." - Susanne Paola Antonetta, author of The Devil's Castle "Haunting and inspiring, Frost Will Come is a book of humane complexity characterized at every turn by the graceful river of Cappello's insight and prose." - Philip Graham, author of What the Dead Can Say "In her searing, searching memoir, Cappello breaks ajar the door to the bardo to reveal that the beings toward which love most radically draws us are themselves irreversibly drawn away. Every page is written from inside that liability. Here, dying becomes a way of knowing, suffering a mode of inquiry, and love a reckoning with oblivion and the profligate generosity of what remains." - Marta Werner, author of Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson's Master Hours
