TLC Book Tour: My Glory Was I Had Such Friends

Reading My Glory Was I Had Such Friends by Amy Silverstein allowed me to meet up with an old friend and check in on her.  Back in 2007, Silverstein's first memoir, Sick Girl, was released.  I still remember it, even though it was a decade ago that I read it.  And from time to time I have wondered what happened to her.

Silverstein's newest memoir has her once again struggling with her health.  Her donor heart has long outlived the decade it was projected to last.  Although she has had to deal with continued issues because of the fact that she is a transplant patient, her life has been more than she ever thought it would be (evidence of this is her ability to raise her son Casey to adulthood, something she and her husband didn't think would happen).

Now, though, her donor heart is failing and she is need of a second transplant.   She and her husband move across the country to California where she is placed on a transplant list.  And a group of her friends devises a calendar where they will spend time with her in the hospital until a donor is found.

Silverstein's focus of this novel is on the friends who have dropped everything in their own lives to be with her.  These women move right in and take up advocating for her, spending time with her, and trying to make things as easy for her as possible.

Part of this memoir almost felt suspenseful as Amy's thirty-day priority placement on the donor list was nearing an end without a heart in sight for her.  I found myself racing along to see when Silverstein would receive the phone call that would save her life.

My only regret about this book is that there is little about the actual transplant or the recovery period.  It's no spoiler for me to tell you that the book ends happily, since if it hadn't Silverstein wouldn't have been around to write about it, but I wish there were more about her life now.

Perhaps she is saving that for a third memoir. I can only hope.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for providing a copy of this book for my review.   All opinions expressed are, as always, my own.

For more information, visit the HarperCollins website.