I’m not clear if this was distilled from Julie’s blog entries. It’s not wholly unique in this genre but earnest in presenting her life’s story. ( )

Julie Yip-Williams’s The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything that Comes After was a rather sad book of an individual diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer.
From the outset readers learned about the author’s birth in Vietnam with blindness from glaucoma. Her family under the influence of a grandmother nearly had her killed because of this disability. Fortunately, she escaped this fate because her family was able to escape by boat to California. While they lived in this state Julie had an operation, and regained some of her sight. These experiences were part of an early miracle.
Julie was later educated at Williams College and Harvard Law School in Massachusetts. During this time, she had internships in Asian countries, and travelled widely to seven continents although disabled. Eventually, she landed a job at a top law firm where she worked. Soon afterwards, she was diagnosed with metastatic cancer when a mass was discovered in her mid-transverse colon.
Julie received treatment for cancer from UCLA, NYU, and Memorial Sloan Kettering. Her CEA kept rising while being treated by oncologists, with radiation, infusions, and MRIs. With Stage 1V cancer she knew quite early that she was dying. But throughout this five-year period, Julie worried about the future of her husband Josh, young children Mia, and Belle.
This book was filled with gut-wrenching emotions that led up to her death. Many family members and friends pitched in while helping the family with their young children. Julie plugged on while taking pain medicine, but her suffering was excruciating. Still, she worked at putting her house in order. Her family bought and restructured an adjoining apartment in Brooklyn where they lived, purchased a new vehicle, burial plot, and she wrote goodbye letters to her husband, and children. During the course of these trials a lot of tears were shed, there were many quarrels, and the complete helplessness of a family with a young dying mother. ( )

This was my second read through of this and it is such an incredible story of life while confronting death head on. She doesn’t hold back, nor does she sugarcoat or saint herself. She admits times when she wasn’t her best, she shares her fears and sorrow, but she celebrates life throughout everything. ( )

Brutally honest and insightful. Her story is remarkable from birth to death, but I could not read every paragraph. I found the book repetitive enough to skip whole passages. ( )

Generous about the rating more because of the honesty of the author. For someone not dealing with cancer, there is a lot of info about drugs, trials, etc. that made for slow reading but yet helped in understanding what cancer patients must deal with for health care. Her feelings about accepting the way she was treated as visually impaired by her family (grandma wanting her killed) her determination to travel alone was amazing. Wonder how her family now feels about her control of their remodeled apartment, instruction about music lessons, the “slutty second wife”. Give credit that was all kept in the book. Husband epilogue was so truthful too. ( )