A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories by Nancy Mairs

by Nancy Mairs

focused personal and ethical examination of life in the face of death, by one of our most acclaimed essayists

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Nancy Mairs was an author who wrote about diverse topics, including spirituality, women's issues and her experiences living with multiple sclerosis. She received an AB from Wheaton College, and an MFA in writing and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.

She was diagnosed with MS when she was 28, and wrote several essays on her experiences as a self-described "cripple", including "On Being a Cripple," "Sex and the Gimpy Girl," and the memoir Waist High in the World.

Reviews

[Dana Reynolds · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mairs covers all of the bases involving the issues of death and dying. I can't think of anything she left out. It is all personal to her, using her own life and the stories of her experience. Obviously, no reader will be able to relate to them all, but that doesn't mean these stories aren't worth reading and reflecting upon. Her narrative style I found to be very accessible.
Yes, some of the stories tend to drag on, or perhaps, were less relevant or understandable to my own experience, but that doesn't detract from the importance of this subject of death. I would add a half of a star rating, if I could. As Mairs points out, even after all the advances this culture has made, this topic still maintains a degree of taboo for conversations in "polite" society. It is a needed book for that reason alone.
A surprise (but not a spoiler): I knew from the cover or preface that Mairs had become a Catholic in her adult life. No Catholic I have ever gotten to know has held such a cosmological view as Mairs had. She put her heresies right out there and I found them very resonant and refreshing.

[Alyssa Foll · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nancy Mairs is an exceptional writer and memoirist. I knew I could count on her to write truthfully and thoughtfully about death, the dying process, and suffering and she did. I appreciated her span of essays — from her work in writing to death-row inmates and working to abolish the death penalty, to the death of her parents, to the loss of her adopted son (who was murdered).
Highly recommended.

[Kristianne]

Mairs tackles death in this book with cynical grace. She's not rosy about the subject, nor is she outrageously dire. She's frank, which I appreciate after slogging through so many book-length glosses of the subject.
Mairs has faced a fair share of death and in the book she talks about loosing her father when she was a child, loosing her mother as an adult, working through depressive embraces of death, working with inmates on death row, and loosing a son to murder. She wants us to look at death as a natural, no matter the circumstance, and consider our responses to it as just as natural.

"As one of life's major events, death might be prepared for as carefully, and conducted as ceremonially, as a wedding or the birth of a child; but generally it is not. What are the emotional and spiritual consequences of ignoring or denying the only outcome our lives can possibly have? What might be the effects of living in a state of preparedness? How can we achieve awareness of life's end without spoiling all our fun? And when death takes from us someone we love, how can we mourn most fruitfully? ... Might bereavement be viewed in wasys that would make it wholesome, however painful?"

[Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a person with MS, it is interesting to see her perspective. I am a cripple too. Often I feel others' hostility toward me. I used to feel that way, so it's understandable.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Riveting. Profoundly moving. An intense search for multiple meanings; constant evolution. Nairs leaves me wanting to read more of her work.