Falling: A Daughter, a Father, and a Journey Back

by Elisha Cooper

Overview

Elisha Cooper spends his mornings creating children's books and his afternoons playing with his two daughters. But when he discovers a lump in five-year-old Zoë's midsection as she sits on his lap at a Chicago Cubs game, everything changes. Surgery, sleepless nights, months of treatment, a drumbeat of worry. Even as the family moves to New York and Zoë starts kindergarten, they must navigate a new normal: school and soccer and hot chocolate at the local café, inter­rupted by visits to the hospital. Elisha and his wife help their daughters maintain a sense of stability and joy in their family life. And he tries to understand this new world—how it changes art and language and laughter—as he holds on to the protective love he feels for his child. 
 
With the observant eye of an artist and a remarkable sense of humor, Cooper captures this emotional journey back to health.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101971840
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/13/2017
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

ELISHA COOPER is the author of many children’s books, including Train, Farm, Homer, and 8: An Animal Alphabet. Beach received a Society of Illustrators Gold Medal in 2006 and Dance! was a 2001 New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year. He was awarded a Sendak Fellowship in 2016. Cooper’s books for adults include A Year in New York and the memoir Crawling: A Father’s First Year. He lives with his family in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

It
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Falling"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Elisha Cooper.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

CONTENTS
 
It 3
 
Fall 12
 
Scans 26
 
Art 36
 
Family 44
 
Waiting 56
 
Words 67
 
Table 76
 
Orchard 86
 
Cycling 95
 
Wild 102
 
Williamsburg 110
 
Remember 117
 
Laughter 124
 
Thanks 133
 
And 138
 
Acknowledgments 145

Editorial Reviews

Compact yet powerful . . . Cooper writes with the plainspoken grace and sharp eye of an artist . . . [Falling] is something special, a tough, tender book that gets at the heart of what it means to make a family and a life.”
     —The Boston Globe

“Poignant . . . [Cooper] proves not that art has saved him but that creative expression, be it by brushstroke, keystroke or both, can help a person transition through a devastating circumstance and transmute something terrifying and painful into a work of art.”
     —The Wall Street Journal

“Cooper’s prose evokes the sharpness—and the melancholy—of his watercolor paintings for his children’s books.” 
     —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Lovely . . . With meditations on memory, loyalty, and the gifts parents and children give one another, Falling is every bit as relevant to parents in general as it is essential to parents facing challenges similar to those that Cooper’s family is dealing with . . . [Falling] shows us that hope, laughter, strength and insight can flourish.”
     —Bookreporter
 
“Gorgeous, stunning . . . [Cooper’s] perspectives and his honesty in sharing them endear him to readers. Sentence by sentence, Cooper’s prose is admirable . . . Bravo.”
     —New York Journal of Books
 
“This tale of fatherly devotion is also a story of discovering what it means to survive in the face of the unknowable. . . . A poignant but never melodramatic musing on parenting, love, and risks . . . Packs a mighty punch.” 
     —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Witty, wise. . . . Cooper’s musings are a good reminder to count blessings, maintain a sense of humor, and live life to the fullest.”
     —Booklist

“A beautiful book that knows so much about love and uncertainty. It knows that life isn’t made of Grand Sweeping Truths but of particular moments—moments of sublimity and irritation, soccer balls kicked into rivers and sandwiches eaten in pediatric oncology wards. This book left me deeply moved, full of admiration, and vibrating with gratitude for the ordinary moments of my own family's life.”
     —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

From the Publisher

There is a matter-of-factness to Cooper's art…that helps Falling avoid the pitfalls of mawkishness and sentimentality.

The New York Times Book Review - Benjamin Anastas

★ 05/09/2016
Children’s book author Cooper (Train) takes the grimmest of subject matters—learning that your young daughter has cancer—and turns it into a poignant but never melodramatic musing on parenting, love, and risks in this slim memoir that packs a mighty punch. The lives of Cooper and his wife, Elise, suddenly shift into warp speed when Cooper feels a lump on four-year-old Zoë’s side when she’s sitting on his lap during a Cubs game. It’s a pediatric kidney cancer called Wilms’s tumor, a so-called “good cancer.” But after surgery, the doctors tell Cooper and Elise that Zoë’s is stage three. Twenty-two weeks of chemo follow, during which the stoic Zoë bonds with nurses, stuffed tiger clutched in her hand, while Cooper spins in a silent rage that bursts forth at inopportune moments. Cooper, Elise, Zoë, and youngest daughter Mia move from Chicago to New York and develop a ritual around Zoë, now in kindergarten, going for treatment every Friday. Cooper tells of the blanket of normalcy that descends, but still, “every week has a Friday.” Zoë is on the mend, and post-treatment scans show no recurrence, yet Cooper still struggles to reconcile the fierce love he feels for his daughter, his need to protect her, and the powerlessness he feels in the face of cancer. This tale of fatherly devotion is also a story of discovering what it means to survive in the face of the unknowable. (June)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2016-03-31
The children's book author shows masterful control in this memoir of a life careening beyond his control.This is a sequel of sorts to Crawling: A Father's First Year (2006), but it's also a very different book. As Cooper writes of that book, "it's short and upbeat, though there's one sentence about not wanting to become the parent of a child with cancer that makes me suck in my breath." In this short memoir, the author has become exactly what he didn't want to be in that throwaway line. It starts with a "bump" on the first page, which Cooper happens to feel when his 4-year-old daughter is sitting on her father's lap watching the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. Two pages later, the bump that he might have been tempted to dismiss has been diagnosed as "a pediatric kidney cancer called Wilms' tumor, a ‘good cancer,' a funny pairing of words." Two pages later, it is "stage three, which is not good." Before the end of this chapter, the author has begun to "wonder if there are elements of this story that may get away from me." He is right to wonder, for under this illusion of stylistic control lies a cauldron of powerful emotion that can erupt at any moment. And it does, to the author's surprise at his own anger, which embarrasses him a little in retrospect and surprises readers, because the prose is so measured. But this is a book in which the subtlety of surface control sustains an exquisite tension with the turmoil beneath, as the author finds others "looking at a man who is a little unhinged." His daughter is fine, for now, after surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and periodic scans. The changes in her are mainly the ones any girl might experience from the ages of 4 to 8. But her father is transformed into a writer who must leave "an angry island" and reconcile the world's horrors with its ineffable beauty. A profoundly moving memoir.

Kirkus Reviews