Did I Ever Tell You

December 1, 2023

Playwright Kingston turns her popular essay from the New York Times's "Modern Love" column into a full-length memoir as she shares her relationship with mother, who died of cancer but managed to continue bestowing her love and wisdom on her kids through gifts and letters she left behind for them to open on major milestones and birthdays. Prepub Alert.

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March 1, 2024
A playwright's emotionally charged debut book about understanding life in the wake of her mother's death. When Kingston was 3, her mother was diagnosed with "an aggressive form of breast cancer" that, over the course of a few years, spread to her brain, ultimately killing her. During those intervening years, the author's mother curated a collection of gifts and messages to mark the birthdays and milestones that would come after her death. Kingston's memoir is the story of her childhood--one defined by the ever-present expectation of and planning for death--and time's insistent march through her adolescence and young adulthood, punctuated with disappointments, depressions, and tragedies. It is also the story of her mother, a narrative that includes revelations, some startling, about her own childhood, accomplishments, and marriage and insights into how she apportioned availability, presence, and guidance to her daughter posthumously. As these threads intertwine, otherwise minor memories, such as a childhood sleepover, become saturated with significance, and the emotional sensations of a child are overlaid with the wisdom and reflection of someone much older. For readers, this striation proves both enriching and disorienting, mirroring a touch-and-go intermittency of illness and the inevitability of her mother's death. Instead of an adult's analysis of the impact of spending her formative years under the yoke of a parent's impending death, the author yearns for the past, situating many of the text's most profound insights with her child self. Thus, Kingston's story captures the distinct way that a child experiences grief, even anticipatory grief, and the struggle of a child's mind to envision a future without a parent. As the shape of her grief changes with age, Kingston teaches us something essential about how to collect, hold, and savor memories of loved ones over a lifetime. A heart-tugging memoir about the many faces of loss.

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April 15, 2024
Kingston's beautifully written debut memoir is both heartrending and hard to put down. From the age of three, Kingston, called Gwenny, lived with the shadow of her mother's illness. When it was deemed terminal, her mother spent weeks at the dining-room table creating parting gifts for Gwenny and her brother. The author's gift was a pink cardboard chest holding treasure: letters, cards, and wrapped gifts to be opened on each birthday and for every milestone (driver's license, graduation, engagement) that her mother would miss. Her mother's gifts and words of love reached into Kingston's future life like "a trail of breadcrumbs," providing direction, affirmation, and affection and proving that a mother's love is "stronger than death." After her mother's death, the author was continuously drawn into conversations initiated by people who knew her mother, who reached out with, "Did I ever tell you?" These unexpected disclosures provided new and revealing details about her mother's life, giving insight into both her mother's story and her own childhood; there is also a bombshell. Kingston's generous telling of her youth and loss is unforgettable and profound.

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Starred review from June 3, 2024
Actor and playwright Kingston delivers a knockout debut about coming to terms with her mother’s death. When Kingston was seven years old, her mother, Kristina, revealed that her once-manageable cancer had become terminal. Four years later, Kristina died, leaving behind a chest of letters and gifts for Kingston to open on birthdays and other milestones, including her first period and her high school graduation. Those missives taught the teenager things about Kristina she’d never known, including her professional achievements and family history, and kept Kingston feeling that “my mother anticipated what I needed before I knew it myself.” When, shortly after Kingston left for college, tragedy struck her family again, she clung to her mother’s letters harder than ever, relying on them and her surviving relatives to make it to graduation. Kingston shares many memorable moments, including how she tried to forestall her parents from sharing news of her mother’s diagnosis by cracking jokes, without allowing the proceedings to become maudlin. This gorgeous, openhearted meditation on grief and family deserves a wide readership. Agent: Brettne Bloom, Book Group.