“You’ve got to let readers know this story has a happy ending,” line editor Kelly Byrd wrote me in an email after working on my writing coach client Sam Simon‘s manuscript. As it turns out, Sam’s memoir, The Actual Dance, doesn’t just have one happy ending, it has two.
This love story is told through the eyes and heart of a husband as he struggles with his worst fears during what he and everyone else expects to be his wife’s losing battle to breast cancer. Despite the aggressive and entrenched disease, however, Sam’s wife, Susan, doesn’t die.
Unlike most cancer memoirs, the book doesn’t focus on the patient’s tough journey to health, but rather on Sam’s experience. As the back cover copy reads:
Determined to support the “other half of his whole,” he provides the positivity his love partner demands and the caregiving she needs. He keeps secret his visits to the virtual ballroom he has constructed—where he believes each one of us will exit into eternity—until he begins to wonder if he’s losing his mind.
Ultimately, Sam finally accepts — and celebrates — both the ballroom and the fact that despite his certainty that he’s about to lose the love of his life, his wife does the impossible and beats her breast cancer. Happy ending number one.
But there is a second happy ending to this story, which has to do with the reception of Sam’s memoir.
After lauding “Simon’s dazzling eloquence when communicating his deepest fear of losing Susan,” Kirkus concluded its review with:
Happily, this moving book suggests that people’s fears are not always manifested in reality in quite the way they anticipated. A lucid, unexpectedly uplifting, and affecting celebration of love that finds hope in despair.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/samuel-simon/the-actual-dance/?page=2
Midwest Book Review wrote:
The Actual Dance could have been titled ‘How to Be a LovePartner™,’ because its instructions ultimately provide guidelines and paths for others facing the illness of a loved one and the threat of their loss...Simon cultivates a powerfully descriptive voice throughout that captures this world in a manner that is thoroughly compelling…The result is not a staid “how to” book, but a journey that is, indeed, a dance. Metaphorically displayed and beautifully presented, The Actual Dance is an invitation not to mourn or accept defeat, but to take the first moves into a different series of actions, reactions, and understanding. Any collection strong in memoirs and books about cancer survival and caregiving, as well as surveys of family relationships and changing connections, will find The Actual Dance a standout in its approach and ability to inject a celebratory, positive tone that reinforces love connections against all odds.
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/mbw/jan_22.htm
No wonder I keep singing George and Ira Gerswhin’s famous refrain to myself:
Who could ask for anything more?
I Got Rhythm lyrics © Wb Music Corp., Ira Gershwin Music, New World Music, Chappell & Co., Inc.
Congrats, Sam!
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