Showing The Closer We Are to Dying by Joe Fiorito

The title of this book is a quotation from a collection of essays by Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One; it could easily have come from another, On Grief and Reason. Confessional memoirs written as part of the grieving process for a parent proliferate these days and with good reason. At its best, the genre describes a rites-of-passage metamorphosis that requires the author to shed their childhood and make peace with themselves as much as with the parent. To volumes such as Philip Roth's Patrimony, Michael Ignatieff's Scar Tissue and Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father can be added Joe Fiorito's The Closer We Are To Dying. Fiorito is a Canadian journalist whose grandparents fled Italy and settled in Northern Ontario, where he grew up. Such powerful emotional rawness can only be justified if deftly handled. In Fiorito's hands it scorches.

The book follows the 20 nights that Fiorito spent at the hospital bedside of his father Dusty, a retired postman and musician, who is in the advanced stages of cancer. The old man deteriorates from periods of lucidity and talkativeness to a morphine-fuddled, anxiety-riddled blankness, interrupted by sentenceless phrases which his son observes, "are the chapter headings of a life, the instinctive twitches of a story-teller. He is dying to talk; he is dying". The narrative takes its lead from the patchwork of stories that Dusty, a heavy drinker who swung between violence to tenderness, repeated to his son throughout his life and which became as familiar as they remained tantalising for a boy wanting to know where his family were from and how they got to where they were. Jarring moments of brutal personal honesty break up themes of racism, xenophobia, mythologising, love and the inevitable death towards which the text inevitably moves. Fiorito understands the underbelly of death, the hate it can contain, that tries to poison the already complicated love. His need to know, and his capacity to bear the knowledge, make for a profoundly accomplished debut. --David Vincent