Making Toast: A Family Story

"Rosenblatt...sets a perfect tone and finds the right words to describe how his family is coming with their grief...It may seem odd to call a book about such a tragic event charming, but it is. There is indeed life after death, and Rosenblatt proves that without a doubt."

"Rosenblatt brings the reader to tears, but with prose that is as restrained as it is evocative...A gem of a memoir, deceptively simple in its proportions, but in truth: sad, funny, brave and luminous...Without self-pity or sanctimony, the author reminds us in this rare and generous book that there is no remedy for death...the best we can do is to pay attention and to love each other well."

"A painfully beautiful memoir telling how grandparents are made over into parents, how people die out of order, how time goes backwards. Written with such restraint as to be both heartbreaking and instructive."

"A quiet, tender memoir...Rosenblatt avoids the sentimentality that might have weighed down the story; he writes with humor and an engagement with life that makes the occasional flashes of grief all the more telling. The result is a beautiful account of human loss, measured by the steady effort to fill in the void."

When his daughter, Amy—a gifted doctor, mother, and wife—collapsed and died from an asymptomatic heart condition, Roger Rosenblatt and his wife, Ginny, left their home on the South Shore of Long Island to move in with their son-in-law, Harris, and their three young grandchildren. With the wit, heart, precision, and depth of understanding that has characterized his work, Roger Rosenblatt peels back the layers on this most personal of losses to create both a tribute to his late daughter and a testament to familial love.