Nicole Chung’s previous memoir, All You Can Ever Know (2018), explored the dynamics of her transracial adoption and of reconnecting with her birth family—the good, the bad, the ugly of these experiences. Her latest memoir is a love letter to her adoptive parents, especially towards the end of their lives. Chung approaches her upbringing here through the lens of class—her parents never had much money to spare. Such a class position meant that for much of her young adulthood, Chung, living across the country, couldn’t afford to see her parents frequently. And it also meant that unexpected expenses hit the family hard, especially when they were related to healthcare.

Most of this memoir lives in the past few years, when her father’s health declined, and she eventually lost both parents. This is top-tier grief writing that makes room for expansive, tumultuous emotions as well as anger at the material conditions—the bureaucratic structures, financial limits—that make illness and death harder to shoulder or stave off.

This year, some necessary and thoughtful “pandemic books” are coming out. Chung lost her mother to cancer in 2020, which meant that she could neither be with her in her last days nor attend the funeral. The challenges of being apart from a dying parent while struggling to parent two young children who are home all day are palpable. And the most gutting and salient parts of the book are Chung’s preparation for and grieving of her mother’s death. Grief is always a great disruptor, as Chung experienced with her father, but what does grief do when it occurs amidst endless disruption? “Much as I want the pandemic to end,” Chung writes, “I find that I’m almost thankful to avoid any semblance of a ‘normal’ life.”

Chung is analytical and emotional, measured and justifiably hysterical. She is a daughter and a mother, someone who grieves and has to convince herself to want to live. There are no neat conclusions here, because grief is an open wound, but Chung’s processing—ongoing—certainly helped me with mine.

Nicole Chung has the incredible gift of capturing her life's most tender and vulnerable moments in a magical and relatable way. The memories she recounts are heart-wrenching and raw. She conveys the immense grief she felt over the loss of her parents in a short period of time; an already impossible situation compounded by the sudden arrival of a worldwide pandemic.

Chung shares about getting terrible news about the health of her parents during the final edits and promotion of her first memoir, All You Can Ever Know. Getting a glimpse behind the scenes of real-life events that no one is exempt from, not even well-known writers, was both eye-opening and heartrending.

Chung's childhood and ongoing relationship with her parents are complicated and nuanced, but the amount of love that is present throughout her life is abundant and deeply felt. This memoir is a stunning tribute to her parents and all they did for her, despite their financial troubles, health problems, and the inherent challenges they faced raising an adopted daughter of a different race.

"A Living Remedy" is a deeply personal recollection of grief and loss, told from the perspective of Nicole Chung.

Despite growing up in what some might a difficult childhood, Nicole Chung knew she was loved by her adoptive parents. She's raised in Oregon where she knows she doesn't look like everyone else including her parents, given her Korean heritage, but also watches as her parents struggle with life in the disappearing "middle class". Her father, working in various restaurants, struggles with the income his job is able to bring in, and Nicole witness first-hand the anxieties and pressures that money brings. Driven by this, Nicole works hard to gain access to higher education, and a scholarship to Johns Hopkins means she's able to leave her hometown and achieve the life her parents hoped she could have.

The family is unprepared for when Nicole's father's diabetes quickly spirals into kidney failure - an event that quickly spirals to his death. It's a jarring, life-changing event, and highlights not only the grief and loss from losing a father, but the pitfalls of the American healthcare system and how discriminatory it is to financially disadvantaged individuals. Nicole is barely able to move forward when her mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer - right before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is in this scenario when Nicole not only has to struggle with the impending loss of her second parent, but navigating it in the midst of a global pandemic when all her interactions with her mother are remote and virtual.

"A Living Memoir" is a beautiful testament to Nicole's parents, a collection of memories and events that demonstrate the love they had for her and for each other. It's a harsh coming of age, cemented by hardship, grief, and loss and the ways they shape and continue to impact us in the present - in the constant financial anxiety that Nicole still can't shake off to the fear of losing even more loved ones. It's also a triumph of love and family, as these are the things that continue to keep us moving forward, no matter what comes our way.

This is not an easy read, but one that I think many will come to appreciate.

How and where do we find ourselves once we are away from home leads to a very interesting story and novel. It is a beautiful story about finding out where we fit in this world and also, where we might find that we don't belong. Excellent!

I was a huge fan of Nicole Chung’s first book, a memoir that made me weep throughout, and I while I was worried about the sophomore slump, I needn’t have been concerned — A Living Remedy is a beautiful piece of writing, open and raw, and yes, it also made me weep. While I found the sections about Chung’s family’s religion a little dull compared to the rest, it did not stop me from reading the entire thing at breakneck speed. Grab your tissues and enjoy.

Thank you to Ecco and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This is a really beautiful memoir. I read and loved the author's first book (as well as their shorter works online) and had a feeling I'd enjoy this one. The writing is as beautiful, delicate, and sparse as ever, and it really works well to balance the heaviness, fear, and heartache that permeates parts of the book. The writer digs deep when it comes to mourning and grieving, and her prose hit me especially hard when it came to the sort of anticipatory grief that comes when someone is sick for a long time, and you're constantly adjusting to their/your new normals. It's so hard and scary and complex, and yet this writer expresses all of this big emotion in delicate, measured sentences filled with both logical understanding and emotional aching. A truly fantastic read, though of course tread lightly if the content could be heavy for you. I think it could be extremely healing, but be gentle with yourself!

After reading Chung's previous book, All You can ever Know ,I eagerly looked forward to her newest memoir. Chung is an adopted Korean daughter of white parents who grew up in Oregon and couldn't wait to leave the racist environment in which she was raised. Not by her parents but by the community, something her parents were not aware of. Trying to make sense of her parents’ lives and her role within the family constellations, she examines their life of living paycheck to paycheck and often without health insurance. She escapes to the East Coast for college but then has many conflicted feelings about abandoning them out West. As her father develops more and more complicated health issues she feels sandwiched between her own burgeoning family and the one who raised her. Money being tight she was not able to help them out much financially and visiting them was perhaps once a year. When her father dies of kidney disease and diabetes, she is struck with a grief so profound that it consumes the reader. She's angry at the health system that has not allowed him to get health benefits that he so dearly needed. Shortly thereafter her mother dies from cancer that has spread throughout her system. Unfortunately, this occurs in the time of COVID when tight restrictions do not allow interactions with the dying individual and funerals become a long-distance affair. Chung's grief is so robust, devastating, and depleting that I had to stop several times because I felt it seeping into my pores. For those who have been in similar situations this book might be a trigger, but it also could be a wonderful release to identify with someone who has experienced this same tragedy.

This book is about grief, brutal, honest grief.
The author could have been writing about my own experience in losing my own mother.

With brutal honesty and reflection upon the authors own feelings and thoughts as she was dealing with the loss of her father and then less then a year later the loss of her mother.

I cried so much throughout the book. I could understand the grief, the loss, the rawness of the emotion and the experiences of the author.

The comfort that she found in her writing, her friends, the screaming in the car, I could relate to them all.

Then with COVID, and not being there for her mothers last moments. What guilt! The story was so raw, I will remember it forever.

I would recommend this book to anyone going through grief.

This book is incredibly good. Chung perfectly encapsulates the many feelings around the death of parents. The events in this book, while heartbreaking, are not particularly unique and yet Chung fills them with writing that brings everyone in the book to life. So so good. I was ripped open by the end.

A very poignant look on what family means and the grief at losing your parents. The author writes in such a way that you feel her visceral pain. It is also a great commentary on the healthcare system in the United States as well as a documentation of the scary days of covid before the vaccine.

**I received a copy of this ARC from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.**
Nicole's memoir is about the heartbreaking loss of both of her adoptive parents and the grief she experiences when losing them in such short time of each other. She discusses often about her disappointment in the health care system within our country that fails her parents when they needed help the most which I find to be a really important part of the book. I loved Nicole's honesty about the sadness and guilt she felt - i.e. still having to be a functional parent. working through the pandemic, not being able to fly to her mom in her last days because of the pandemic, not having enough money to help foot health care costs of her parents, etc. Eventually, I hope to back track and read Nicole's first memoir.

I was a big fan of Chung's first release, so eagerly anticipated reading this. I read most in one sitting, in the grips of pregnancy insomnia, which felt fitting for a book that so deeply and poignantly examines the complex intertwining of motherhood alongside being a daughter too. For my reading, one of the most defining characteristics of this was the reflections on grief, specifically amidst the pandemic. The forced modifications to traditions and what families were even allowed to do when loved ones became sick and passed. But also on our needs as grieving people, and how being a mother tugs at the way you grieve as a child too. To the limitations of screens to transport us in the absence of being physically present, something many readers will be able to painfully relate to.

This was a stunning read, completely unputdownable and genuinely bringing me to tears in parts - real heartbeat-on-the-page kind of reading.

Many thanks for a copy to read via netgalley.

I just love the way this woman puts words on paper! Such a beautiful, genuine book. No sophomore slump here - if you liked All You Can Ever Know, you will love this title as well.

With the characteristic thoughtfulness that made All You Can Ever Know such an arresting read, Chung makes clear just how much of a force she is as a memoirist. While her story is fully unique, small aspects throughout the book will resonate with everyone who has ever loved their perfectly-imperfect family in a world that conspires to offer us difficult choices.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher of ECCO, and the author Nicole Chung for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Chung's first memoir All You Can Ever Know is a great companion book to this memoir and can help readers contextualize their understanding of her adopted parents in this book, yet this memoir suffices in standing out on its own. Chung covers how difficult it is to be low-income and working-class in America through her parents. Chung shows their struggles living paycheck to paycheck as well as the US healthcare insurance system. Chung's memoir also details the Covid-19 pandemic and how her relationship with her adopted mother is affected. Chung's memoir has a lot of pathos in fleshing out her relationship with her parents.

"A Living Remedy" by Nicole Chung is a sad book. That's not a a complaint, but important to get that out of the way. The book covers Chung's relationship with her adoptive parents, and the devastation of losing them too soon to illness both before and during the early, uncertain days of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Reading this book will have you evaluating your own relationship with your parents, the unfairness of the US health insurance system, and the difficulty of living paycheck-to-paycheck. My number one takeaway from this book is how much Chung loved and was loved by her parents.

While not required, I highly recommend reading Chung's first memoir "All You Can Ever Know" before digging in to "A Living Remedy."

I received an ARC of "A Living Remedy: A Memoir" for free, this had no bearing on my rating and review. Thank you to NetGalley and ECCO!

I loved Nicole Chung's earlier memoir, All You Can Ever Know, and so was very excited to read this new one. It did not disappoint! Chung's open and vulnerable writing style is very sweet and appealing to me as a reader. 10/10!

A very sad book. I liked learning more about her parents who featured in her previous work but what a sad story. I appreciated the look at how something as commonplace as being low income yet working steadily has these long reaching effects. The book was honest and detailed which is a welcome change from a lot of memoirs.

Beautifully written emotional moving.a look at what a family and love for each other really encompasses fro deep grief to hope.This is the second memoir I’ve read by Nicole Chung each an amazing read.#netgalley #ecco

A heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful narrative which tackles grief in an unflinching and important way.. I admired Chung's earlier book and I admire this one very much as well.