Wall Street Journal culture reporter Katherine Rosman longed to find answers to the questions that we all grapple with after losing someone we love. So she did what she does best: she opened her notebook and started asking questions.
Faced with the loss of her mother to cancer at sixty, Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Rosman spent a year investigating the life of a woman she only knew as a parent. Along the way, Rosman discovered another side to her mother—a woman whose life was intricately connected to a host of characters her daughter hardly knew.
Embarking on a cross-country odyssey that would take her into the heart of some quirky, colorful communities, Rosman interviewed friends and acquaintances of her mother, as well as people whose relationships were more complex though no less potent–a former golf caddie, a legendary Pilates instructor, an eBay glass collector and an immigrant doctor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, among them. As Rosman attempted to fill in the blank spaces that might explain her mother’s motivations and philosophies in building a life and in facing death, she came to understand this woman as she never imagined she could.
Blending humor, honesty and old-fashioned reporting, Rosman’s grapples with the bittersweet reality that sometimes we can’t truly know someone until after she is gone. At once comforting, candid and very funny, If You Knew Suzy is a heartfelt memoir against which readers can consider themselves and the lives of all those they love.
