Description: Though still reeling from their daughter's untimely death, Rosenblatt and his wife Ginny carry on, reconstructing a family, sustaining one another, and guiding three lively, alert, and tenderhearted grandchildren through the pains and confusions of grief.
Brief description:
Roger Rosenblatt is the author of six off-Broadway plays and eighteen books, including Lapham Rising, Making Toast, Kayak Morning and The Boy Detective. He is the recipient of the 2015 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.
Review Quotes:
"A painfully beautiful memoir telling how grandparents are made over into parents, how people die out of order, how time goes backwards. Written with such restraint as to be both heartbreaking and instructive." - E.L. Doctorow
"The blow of the improbable: a highly achieved daughter who is the mother of very young children is tragically struck down in her radiant prime. Husband, children, and grandparents are bereft, and what can come of such a maelstrom of grief? MAKING TOAST, Roger Rosenblatt's piercing account of broken hearts, records how love, hurt, and responsibility can, through antic wit and tenderness, turn a shattered household into a luminous new-made family." - Cynthia Ozick
"[A] piercing account of broken hearts [that] records how love, hurt, and responsibility can, through antic wit and tenderness, turn a shattered household into a luminous new-made family." - Cynthia Ozick
Roger Rosenblatt means, I believe, to teach patience, love, a fondness for the quotidian, and a deftness for saving the lost moment--when faced with lacerating loss. These are brilliant lessons, fiercely-learned. But Rosenblatt comes to them and to us--suitably--with immense humility. - Richard Ford
"Written so forthrightly, but so delicately, that you feel you're a part of this family. Rosenblatt's writing turns a story that might be too uncomfortable to read, or too sentimental, in the direction of simple facts that required sophisticated, but instinctual, responses. How lucky some of us are to see clearly what needs to be done, even in the saddest, most life-altering circumstances. - Ann Beattie
"Written so forthrightly, but so delicately, that you feel you're a part of this family... How lucky some of us are to see clearly what needs to be done, even in the saddest, most life-altering circumstances." - Ann Beattie
"There are circumstances in which prose is poetry, and the unornamented candor of Rosenblatt's writing slowly attains to a sober sort of lyricism...This is more than just a moving book. It is also a useful book....[Rosenblatt's] toast is buttered with wisdom. " - Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic
"Rosenblatt avoids the sentimentality that might have weighed down [Making Toast]; he writes with humor and an engagement with life that makes the occasional flashes of grief all the more telling. The result is a beautiful account of human loss, measured by the steady effort to fill in the void. - Publishers Weekly
"[MAKING TOAST] is about coping with grief, caring for children and creating an ad hoc family for as long as this particular configuration is required, but mostly it's a textbook on what constitutes perfect writing and how to be a class act." - Carolyn See, The Washington Post
"Rosenblatt...sets a perfect tone and finds the right words to describe how his family is coming with their grief... It may seem odd to call a book about such a tragic event charming, but it is. There is indeed life-after death, and Rosenblatt proves that without a doubt." - USA Today
"A gem of a memoir, deceptively simple in its proportions, but in truth: sad, funny, brave and luminous. . . . Without self-pity or sanctimony, the author reminds us in this rare and generous book that there is no remedy for death. The way to live, he concludes, is 'to value the passing time"; the best we can do is to pay attention and to love each other well.'" - Los Angeles Times
"It may seem odd to call a book about such a tragic event charming, but it is. There is indeed life after death, and Rosenblatt proves that without a doubt." - USA Today
"A beautiful account of human loss, measured by the steady effort to fill in the void. - Publishers Weekly
"There are circumstances in which prose is poetry, and the unornamented candor of Rosenblatt's writing slowly attains to a sober sort of lyricism. But this is more than just a moving book. It is also a useful book. Perhaps because beauty is the antithesis of use, there is something especially marvelous about useful beauty. MAKING TOAST, a memoir of helpfulness, may actually help some of the people who read it. There are not many books that are important in this way: Helen Garner's The Spare Room, a shatteringly honest and artful account of assisting a friend through her dying, is another such book. The epigraph to Garner's austere masterpiece, from Elizabeth Jolley, captures also the large spirit of Rosenblatt's book: "It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep." Rosenblatt's children and grandchildren chose their father and grandfather well. His toast is buttered with wisdom. " - Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic
"A must read for all....By no means treacly with sentiment, the book takes us through the ordinary along with the extra-ordinary events in the life of this family as they struggle to regain their center and go on with their lives. - Bookbrowse.com
"[A] gem of a memoir... sad, funny, brave and luminous....[a] rare and generous book." - Los Angeles Times
"Sad but somehow triumphant, this memoir is a celebration of family, and of how, even in the deepest sorrow, we can discover new links of love and the will to go on." - O, The Oprah Magazine
"[An] exquisite, restrained little memoir filled with both hurt and humor." - NPR's All Things Considered
"Hauntingly lovely." - Christian Science Monitor