Four Funerals, No Marriage (A Memoir)

- Michael Sadowski, Author of Men I’ve Never Been: A Memoir, one of Book Authority’s 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Books of All Time

In Four Funerals, No Marriage: A Memoir, author Mike Keren gives his readers an inside look at his unexpected foray into caregiving to his sick and dying parents and in-laws. Often funny and always poignant, the story begins when his loving but difficult parents announce they are moving back to New Jersey from their retirement home in North Carolina because they “never really liked it there.” Within days of arriving on a house-hunting trip, his father is hospitalized with a stroke and his mother with another in a series of heart attacks. At the same time, his partner’s mother is recuperating from a hysterectomy and struggling with chemotherapy after a diagnosis of uterine cancer. Additionally, he must deal with the unhappy marriage between his parents, sibling relationships that have often been his undoing, a homophobic world, and his own lifetime of affective dysregulation.