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Life Events by Karolina Waclawiak

It might seem like this isn’t the year for reading a book that’ll make you cry so hard that you cease to have any moisture left in your body, but I’m here to tell you that’s the exact kind of book you need to read. I read Karolina Waclawiak’s Life Events in January, my hand clutched around my throat the entire time, barely able to take a breath. In Life Events, 30-something year old Evelyn is on the brink of a divorce, and worried about the deaths of everyone she loves. To stave off this anxiety, she joins a collective of “exit guides,” helping terminally ill people leave on their own terms. Waclawiak — who is an editor at BuzzFeed News and my boss, but she definitely, absolutely is not making me write this — also wrote this striking essay about her own mother’s illness and, eventually, her death.

I know, I know. It sounds heavy. And it is, but reading Life Events feels like pressing a comforting weight on your own heart. I won’t lie to you: It’s dark as shit. But it’s still funny and soothing, contemplative and intense. I rarely know what it means when people say a book is “moving,” but for one of the first times in my life, I think I get it. Life Events is a subtle book — miss a line and you miss a feeling — but it still feels so propulsive and powerful, a kind of pleasurable tension.

We’re all grieving a little bit right now, no matter what we’re enduring. Since the beginning of the pandemic stay-in-shelter orders, I’ve returned to Life Events over and over to understand my own grief. It’s a struggle to look at death and despair in the eye, but that’s exactly what this book does, and somehow, in a way that doesn’t inspire fear but rather, rebirth. There’s no better time than now to experience a little exquisite agony. Get your copy. —Scaachi Koul

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This week, we're chatting with Elisabeth Thomas about Catherine House — her debut novel (and last month's BuzzFeed Book Club pick) — which follows Ines as she becomes enthralled with a prestigious boarding school that's hiding sinister secrets around a mysterious element called plasm. *MINOR SPOILERS BELOW*

This month, the BuzzFeed Book Club is reading The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. Sign up to read along.