He should also be applauded for not giving in to self-pity, which helps Home Is Burning avoid being a whinge-fest. Kudos to him for injecting humour to hold on to the reader’s attention. The topics that Marshall covers are undoubtedly heavy – looking after dying parents, sibling interactions, and trying to maintain a relationship amidst physical death – and can be a hard read. This approach towards addressing something as profound as witnessing your parents dying may not appeal to many readers, but it works remarkably well in Home Is Burning. Then, with typical candour, writes, “I seem to be the only one who has not cried”, pondering if it was natural for him to remain aloof from the obvious emotional turmoil that is taking place at home.įrom his writing style, it is obvious that Marshall uses humour as a crutch to handle that emotion. Marshall provides vignettes of his siblings’ reactions to having both parents fighting terminal illness. Marshall writes that the all thechildren went through the stages of denial (“Dad is so fit! He is running the Boston Marathon!”) to finally admitting to themselves that their father has an illness that would eventually render him a vegetable. So when Dad was diagnosed with ALS, it shook all five children and Mum to the core. Marshall hints that eldest sister (and first child) Tiffany was the one who helped Dad while Mum was fighting cancer: “It was because all the burden of responsibility fell on her, it prevented Tiffany from leaving Utah or starting her life,” Marshall writes in one of many moments of raw honesty. The five children and their mother relied on Dad to ensure the household was well-maintained, that the children’s emotional needs were taken care of, and Mum could rely on Dad to drive her to her numerous chemotherapy sessions (and to take care of her in the aftermath of those debilitating sessions). It was their father who became both Mum and Dad, earning a living and ensuring the children did not go without.
In the preface, readers learn that the Marshall family had faced a challenge when Marshall’s mother was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer, when she was 37. However, Marshall’s life plan does not pan out as he had envisioned. He was 24, and he had his life – more or less – planned out. Marshall left Utah for Berkeley where he enrolled as a communications student in the University of California, Berkeley, and met his girlfriend (and possibly the love of his life) Abby, and upon graduation, worked as a marketing and communications executive.
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