Reading With Matthew: Unexpected Encounters in Empathy, Admiration, Guilt and Forgiveness

by S.D. Turner

Becoming book friends with a dying neighbor. This is the story Georgia Mason, Turner's I-narrator, tells in Reading With Matthew , a novella in the shape of a memoir. Georgia, a former lawyer with literary ambitions, recounts how she began to visit Matthew, a lawyer and former football star, after he became bed-ridden with Lou Gehrig's disease. At first Matthew could spell words on his board to converse, but more and more he could only move his eyes to speak. Georgia started to read to him. But which story or novel? Slowly, she began to trust Matthew to choose. Years earlier, when they first met, she had rejected him as a book friend for snobbish, superficial reasons, conduct that shames her now. Matthew and his loving wife Jane have become icons of courage to Georgia. Every book group faces the what shall we read next, but in the case of a man whose mind is imprisoned in a physical shell, that question becomes paramount.

Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie , Jean Dominique-Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly , and Lisa Genova's Every Note Played , all tell the story of a person afflicted with Lou Gehrig's or similar incapacity, but none of them has Reading With Matthew's other one woman's struggle to transform herself into a fiction writer and the analysis of classic stories and novels.

96 pages, Paperback

Published September 29, 2022