A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung

Publisher: Ecco

On Sale Date:  April 4, 2023

Pages: 256

I reviewed a review copy from the publisher through Netgalley.com

After her brilliant and powerfull first memoir All You Can Ever Know, author Nicole Chung is back with a second powerfull and moving memoir. This time about the broken healthcare system in the USA, and how this affected her adoptive parents, both suffering from serious illnesses.

In her first memoir, Nicole Chung described how she grew up in a small Oregon town, where she was the only Korean. In this memoir we read about after she left her hometown, to study at a private university on the East Coast on a scholarship, where she finally no longer was the only Korean. But there are also many  difficulties. She always thought she lived a middle class life with her husband, but at university she sees a whole other kind of middle class, with big homes, college funds and expensive vacations. Something very different then how she lived with her parents, where health insurance and financial safety nets are almost nonexistent because they lived from paycheck to paycheck that they had to stretch to the end of every week, while they where working very hard.

When diabetes and kidney disease makes her father dies at only sixty seven, Nicole is in deep grief and rage. A better financial acces to healthcare could have prevented his early death. And just in the middle of all her grief,  a year later her mother is diagnosed with an agressive type of cancer, and seeing her mother is becoming more difficult because they are living in different states amidst the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. And Nicole didn't have the chance to see her mom one last time.

A Living Remedy is a moving follow up to Nicole Chung's previous memoir. I loved her first memoir so I was very curious for this new one. Altough the tragic of illness and the failing American healthcare system is a red line of the story, Nicole Chung tells it in a beautiful way, she doesn't sugarcoat anything, she tells it like it truly happened and in a very clear, understandable way that makes this a very accessible read for many readers. My heart truly broke for what happened to her parents, and it didn't left me for a few weeks after reading the book, because everyone knows someone close to them affected by a kidney illness or cancer. I truly recommend reading this second memoir by Nicole Chung, just as much as her first memoir, because they are truly something different then usual in a good way, and very touching and moving!!