Book Review | What Does It Feel Like?

Notes, quotes, & final thoughts; honest, thoughtful, and a little chaotic

Incredibly saddened this morning to hear of Sophie Kinsella’s passing and thought it would be appropriate to share my thoughts on the last book I read that she wrote. It was one of my favorite reads of 2024 and earned itself a place of my forever favorites shelf. She’ll always have a special place in my heart.

⭐️ Quick Take: Sophie Kinsella will always have a special place in my heart because I grew up loving the shopaholic series! Together with that series she’s written over 20 novels.

This story was heart-wrenching and brought me to tears. It was so raw and personal and I deeply appreciate that she shared this with the world.

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📖 ✨Review: What Does It Feel Like? A Novel By Sophie Kinsella✨ 129 pages

⭐️ 5 stars, forever favorite

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Read if you like…

💖 Book of the Month picks

💖 Short quick read (129 pages)

💖 Emotional, raw, and deeply personal

Themes

💭 Cancer, illness, grief

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Annotated quotes and thoughts

I made so many annotations and highlights - this book is a great reminder that grief and loss is something many are not prepared for. It was also a heartbreaking reminder of the importance of reviewing documents and making plans to have things settled and prepared for when you leave the world, because you never know when your time will be up.

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Favorite Quotes:

✨ “My advice is to write the book you would like to read yourself… Write what you know and do it convincingly… Write the truth about life.”

✨Quote on having multiple children: ‘The work is multiplied, the worry is multiplied, the joy is multiplied, the love is multiplied.’

✨ “You have incurable cancer, my beautiful Eve. But you keep forgetting and I have to keep reminding you and these are the hardest moments of my life.”

✨ ‘It’s quite a full-time job, this being-I’ll business.’

✨ ‘Maybe pre-grief is a better term.’

✨ Quote on grief in relation to children: ‘Realistic yet optimistic and full of hope, which is basically how Eve feels when she’s not racked with guilt… Now she looks around at her beloved children’s faces, wondering if they’re OK, hoping that they’re resilient, wondering as she does approximately every five minutes how much longer she has on this earth and feeling — yet again — an overpowering guilt.’

✨ ‘I may never see you grow up, my beautiful girl, and I can’t bear it.’

✨ ‘I cycle through denial, despair, shock, grief, and then sometimes ridiculous happiness. I appreciate small pleasures so much more than I did, but then along comes the brutal knowledge again. Sometimes I contemplate dying and leaving my family and I can’t bear it. I wait until the house is empty, then cry ugly sobs, inconsolable, loud, keening and wailing, punching the bed with ineffectual, powerless fists…’

✨ ‘The way to get though radiotherapy: pretend your are at a fancy spa.’

✨ ‘All the way through, tell yourself that this treatment will flood your brain with healing and vanish any remaining cancerous debris. Manifest it to be true. Will it to be true. Make it to be true.’

✨ “Cancer is a buzzkill, what Roth the pills and the chemo and the dying.”

✨ ‘Ev laughs, because “luckily” is their family watch word. Tack it on to any gloomy sentence, and you can turn things around.’

✨ ‘She wants to tail and shout and hit thins. And she feels —yet again— consumed by guilt that she has been the cause of so much distress. She knows this cancer is not her fault— it’s just bad luck. But what she has learned is that you can feel guilty for having had bad luck.’

✨ ‘It warms her, to think of herself as part of a community, even if it’s not a community she would have chosen to join.’

✨ ‘And right at that moment, this is her only aim in life, the only happy ending she wants. Just to keep going.’

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