Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for April 2022.

I'm David Plotz of CityCast. I'm here in Washington, D.C.

In Love by Amy Bloom recounts the death by suicide of Amy's husband, Brian Amici,

following his diagnosis with

Alzheimer's disease. The book is a detailed account, very detailed account of how Amy and Brian

struggled to find a way for him to take his own life and finally located the one place in the

world that would help them, which is a Swiss organization called Dignitas.

It sounds grib.

It is not.

In Love is a beautiful book.

It's a sad book.

It's also a really funny and delightful book, which I hope we will convey today.

And truly, I tore through In Love, not just for personal reasons that I'll get into, but because it's paced kind of like a thriller,

but also reads like a comedy, and it has an enormous heart. So Amy Bloom, I'm so happy to be joined by you from Connecticut. Welcome to Gavis Reeds. Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

And before I get to in love, I want to remind our listeners that Amy is also a spectacular

writer in all kinds of forms in essay,

in novel, in short stories. We've talked, both Emily Bazelan and I have talked on the GabFest

about Away, her novel, which is one of our very favorite books, both Emily and mine.

Very different flavor than this. So, Amy, who was Brian Amici? Why did you marry him?

Oh, well, he was a hard man to stop, and he certainly wanted to get married.

When he played football at Yale, his nickname, as he would have been happy to tell you, was Thor.

And that gives you some sense of what he was like.

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