This remarkable memoir, with its unlikely but actual surprise appearance of a long-lost birth child, entwines many strands of reflection on personal choices and consequences, family ties, and what it means to reclaim life in the midst of losses and in the wake of poor decisions. Armstrong wrote it, he claims, because Eileen asked him to, but it is very much his own story. The writer maintains a thoughtful and respectful distance from the intimacies of his former wife’s pain and of her healing time with her birth daughter, keeping his own grieving, ambivalences, remembered pain, gratitude, and learning moments in the foreground.

Some chapters focus on his relationship with his three grown sons, some on his own history of alcoholism and his regrets about poor parenting, though much healing has taken place, some on his own efforts to process the loss of a woman still very much a part of his life and psyche as she succumbs to the rapid course of her illness.

The book testifies to the endurance and complexity of family, the possibility of healing after many kinds of loss, as well as the fact that some losses are permanent. Sober, but neither maudlin nor bleak, it might be a helpful story to those who are sorting through the ways illness occurs in their own disrupted or broken relationships and sometimes offers occasions for renewal.