Book of the month: Love Like Salt
'Love Like Salt: A Memoir' is the touching story of what it's like to live with the shadow of illness
kevin.mccormick4083
‘She tasted of mermaids, of the sea,’ says Helen Stevenson after kissing her youngest daughter Clara, whose salty skin is a tell-tale symptom of cystic fibrosis, an incurable genetic condition that shortens the life expectancy of those who have it.
In Love Like Salt, (a title that’s taken from a fairytale), motherhood, medicine and music are explored with a spellbinding intensity.
This memoir is beautifully written and entirely emotionally honest – describing exactly what it’s like to live under the shadow of Clara’s illness, with its worries and fears, handfuls of pills and hospital stays, but it’s also a celebration of a family who are still determined to live as luminous a life as possible, to make a kind of poetry out of the everyday.
Love Like Salt by Helen Stevenson is published by Virago, £14.99
