Deathbeds and Birthdays

The follow-on to her sensational debut novel Flight, Oona Frawley’s Deathbeds and Birthdays is a unique and deeply personal memoir about the deaths and births that have shaped her life and transformed how she understands the world. Through a forensic application of the artist’s eye on these momentous occasions – intensely personal and entirely universal – we travel into the lives of her parents and the experience of family on both sides of the Atlantic. 

How do we live when our loved ones are dying? How do we make sense of the world in their wake? And how are such losses countered by birth? 

A writer witnesses her mother’s descent into dementia at the same time as her dear friend is stricken with cancer. Through their illnesses and following their deaths, she is propelled to reconsider the death of her father in New York decades earlier. While grieving, she parents two young children who bring such joy that the state of loss is always seesawing with that of profound gratitude for the present. Deathbeds and Birthdays is a series of intertwined, fragmented essays, pieces of memoir that reflect on death, birth, and the legacies of love that stay with us.