Find a Place for Me

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“…This memoir will burrow down deep into your heart, finding its own place of comfort there. I dare you to be able to put it down.” —Noley Reid, author of Pretend We Are LovelyFind a Place for Me is a memoir about facing a marriage’s last act—a spouse’s death—as a couple united in mind and holding hands. Deirdre and Bob are married eleven years and have two young children when forty-three-year-old Bob is diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. ALS determines the journey their marriage will now take, but Bob and Deirdre are resolute in how they will traverse their remaining months as a couple. Chronicling Bob’s illness, Find a Place for Me is also the love story of a happy marriage filled with humor, honesty, and essential conversations. In this moving, tragic, and surprisingly funny book, Deirdre and Bob raise a glass to love and the life each of them has left while learning how to lovingly say goodbye.

“Find a Place for Me roughrides grief, anxiety, and an unflagging humor in such a beguilingly fresh approach to love and saying goodbye. This memoir will burrow down deep into your heart, finding its own place of comfort there. I dare you to be able to put it down.” —Noley Reid, author of Pretend We Are Lovely

“Find a Place for Me is a love story more than anything else, the story of a marriage as one spouse succumbs to a terminal illness. As Fagan watches her husband’s daily decline, she ‘filet[s herself] one layer at a time,’ doing everything she can to honor his wishes and savor the moments left, while trying to come to terms with a life after his leaving. She is a reluctant survivor, one with a ‘mourning season’ in the fall, during which she’s lost both parents, two brothers, and now her beloved Bob. This memoir is the answer to the title’s command, a place where Bob becomes legendary; Fagan pokes ’pinholes of light’ by telling their story of love and death in painstaking honesty and with surprising humor. She reflects on ’liv[ing] death day-to-day’ and then ’surviv[ing] the end of love,’ forming a broader commentary on how we judge love, and how death confounds us. Find a Place for Me becomes a primer for living life head-on, ’instead of putting your shit in your back pocket and pretending it’s not there.’ —Katie Kalisz, author of Quiet Woman

“Find a Place for Me is a luminous and loving portrait of a young family who must quickly pivot to a new normal when dad is diagnosed with ALS. Deidre Fagan’s sweet and straightforward prose is like a conversation with a close friend. It is less than one year that Fagan travels ’the long walk towards Bob's death and our departure from each other.’ And in that span of time she conveys not only her own challenges but lets us get close to Bob, whose courage and humor resonates and lingers. This memoir is a journey of a terminal illness where every page is very much about being alive.” —Donna Kaz, author of UN/MASKED, Memoirs of a Guerrilla Girl on Tour

“At its heart, Find a Place for Me is a love story. Deirdre Fagan chronicles her family’s heartbreaking, ten-month journey of caring for her young husband, Bob, as he battles ALS. Juggling her roles as caregiver, wife, lover and mother, Fagan paints a portrait of this intimate time with honesty and heart. In the end, their couplehood exemplified the code by which Bob lived—’with passion, honesty, strength, and an appreciation for each other and life itself.’ This is a memoir that will stay with me.” —Susan Pohlman, author of Halfway to Each Other: How a Year in Italy Brought Our Family Home “This book transcends the monolith of terminal illness, chronicling grief through the everyday rituals and meditations of marital intimacy. It’s a story of death illumined on all sides by brimming life. Deirdre Fagan has written something profound in its honesty and humanity, celebrating a love that was—is—profound.” —Adam Schuitema, author of The Things We Do that Make No Sense "Fagan is a sharply descriptive writer, capable of viscerally capturing the pain of impending loss… A frank and affecting ALS account with lucid and at times heartbreaking writing." —Kirkus Reviews "Find a Place for Me is a powerful testament to love and to the strength of the human spirit. It is a brave work, unapologetic in raising difficult issues regarding illness and relationships… Find a Place for Me is a worthy primer both on how to approach one’s death and how to live in the moment." —Diane Gottlieb, PRISM magazine Deirdre Fagan is the author of a collection of short stories, The Grief Eater, Adelaide Books (2020), a chapbook of poetry, Have Love, Finishing Line Press (2019), and a reference book, Critical Companion to Robert Frost, Facts on File (2007). Fagan is associate professor and coordinator of creative writing in the English, Literature, and World Languages Department at Ferris State University and has also published in numerous academic and literary journals. Meet her at deirdrefagan.com

BOOK CLUB FAVORITE: Many topical discussion points such as honesty in love, marriage, illness, death, and dying; how to live and die well; end-of-life decision making; caregiving; parenting while in crisis; sexuality; disability; and survival in the face of extraordinary loss.

FOR RELATIONSHIP LOVERS seeking models of love that are not jealous but kind and selfless. It woos with its “beguilingly fresh approach to love” (Noley Reid, author of Pretend We Are Lovely)

ESSENTIAL DEATH & DYING READ for those interested in living and dying well with a terminal illness and those seeking more information about spousal caregiving as well as about neurological disorders such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease). “It’s a story of death illumined on all sides by brimming life.” (Adam Schuitema, Fiction writer)

FOR LOVERS OF LITERARY MEMOIRS: “Lyrical. Raw. Unflinching” (Kathleen Waites, literary critic). Written in lyrical prose with poetry by the author, her late husband and father, and including references to other poets and philosophers.

FOR CAREGIVERS, WIDOWS/WIDOWERS AND THOSE DIVORCED who seek insights into how to love one’s way into the future while simultaneously facing the loss of a marriage and a life. “At its heart, Find a Place for Me is a love story.” (Susan Pohlman, memoirist)

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