This book is featured on Throwback Thursday @ https://readrantrockandroll.com/2017/11/02/throwback-thursday-november-2nd-befor...

I picked this up from a library book sale years ago and read it in just a few hours. It's a book about a woman named Ruth Picardie who was diagnosed with breast cancer in her early 30's just after giving birth to her twins. She was an amazing journalist and her sister influenced her to write about her condition.

I was surprised by the format as pretty much the entire book contains personal email correspondence to and from friends and colleagues. It's also interlaced with thoughts from family and the five columns Ruth wrote about her condition.

Letter from Jenny Dee, 18 September 1997

Dearest Ruthie,

You are my best friend and I am so reluctant to let you go. I've been putting off thinking about you dying because I just don't know how my life will be without you. We have done so many hugely important and amazingly trivial things together - you are the diary that I never kept. The language of love and loss seems so inept at the moment. All I can say is that I will miss you forever, you are my best friend forever and I love you forever.

Even though Ruth was a very brave soul, the book still made me bawl my eyes out. By the time I got halfway through the book, I realized that Ruth was somebody I wish I would've known in my life. She was so courageous, positive, and kind. I couldn't imagine being in her shoes and she handled everything which such strength all the way up until the end. This is a book I'll always keep and my rating on it is 5*****. ( )

This book was heart-breaking. Not in the outright sad way that you would expect. The pain sneaked up on you like a sunburn. One minute your laughing - truly feeling the warmth Ruth Picardie has for her family and life, the next minute you feel the sting of a tear burning in your eyes.


It's unlike any memoir I've read. In that, it is not written to you, the reader. It is a series of notes, letters, email and various correspondence between Ruth Picardie and her family/friends during her fatal battle with breast cancer. You can feel the life leaving her, the illness taking over, the breath she cannot catch.

And it breaks your heart.
( )

A heartbreaking but moving story of one women's journey with terminal breast cancer. Complied in series of letters and emails to her friends it traces her moods, feelings and battle with dying. An extrordinary insight into dealing with cancer and coming to terms with death. ( )

From my Club Read 09 journal (http://www.librarything.com/topic/58691)

---

I realized last night, after finishing Ruth Picardie's Before I Say Goodbye, that I've been on a rather morbid memoir streak this year: there was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, then Carole Radziwill's What Remains, at least one other whose name escapes me at the moment, and now Picardie's Before I Say Goodbye. Each features a medical dimension; for Radziwill and Picardie it's cancer (although R is writing about losing a husband to it, while P wrote about her own experience). But my gut reaction to Goodbye was much warmer than to the other two. Perhaps my being closer to her in age (Picardie died in her early 30s) had something to do with that, but I also liked the book better for its rough form: instead of a smooth, seamless 1st person memoir, Picardie's book is made up of emails, letters and opinion pieces, ordered chronologically. This to me comes off as a far more 'real' form for contemporary memoir in this electronic age. And it also allows the reader to watch the evolution of certain ideas and ways of expressing them from their initial appearances in personal emails to their later published form. As someone who likes writing nearly as much as reading, I really appreciated that.

Finally, I want to add that Picardie's emails to and from a friend named India were my favorite parts. Some had me laughing out loud. Those bits gave the book a sort of 'Bridget Jones Gets Breast Cancer' edge: comic rants, jokes about diet, fashion, followed by moments of (very self-conscious) self-pity followed by shots of self-deprecating humor... If I ever come down with a terminal illness, or correspond with a close friend who has, I can imagine reading and writing emails like these.

Almost 4 stars. ( )

Die britische Journalistin und Mutter von Zwillingsbabys Ruth Picardie berichtet aus der letzten Zeit ihres Lebens. Justine Picardie veröffentlichte mit „Noch einmal deine Stimme hören: Leben nach dem Tod meiner Schwester“ (Orig.: If the spirit moves you. Life and love after death) bei Hoffmann und Campe 2002 ein Buch zum Gedächtnis ihrer Schwester. ( )