Alexis knows she works too much and she has done so since she started her own ad firm a few years ago. She’s missed a lot of things like family dinners and school plays, but she knows Tommy, her supportive partner, will smooth everything over, especially with their teenage daughter CeCe, who is definitely at the stage of hating everything Alexis does or says. (She even hopes that the couple will split up so she can live with Tommy alone.)
When Tommy is diagnosed with terminal cancer and chooses not to fight it, everything Alexis has depended on is thrown into disarray. He wants to spend his last summer at their beach house in Destin, Florida, where they first met as children, so despite her concerns about his ex-wife, a television actress, being in Destin at the same time they will be, she can’t deny him this wish.
It’s not easy going from being the one taken care of to becoming the caretaker, especially when your daughter has such resentment for you. The worse Tommy’s condition gets, the more strained her relationship with CeCe gets, even though Alexis is (mostly) doing the best she can.
As you can imagine, this is a tremendously poignant book but it’s not maudlin. It’s a book that is tremendously genuine in its depiction of grief, facing the loss of your true love or your parent, and how hard it is to see someone who was so vital become so physically ill.
The one area I struggled with was CeCe. I understood her attitude toward Alexis, and know it’s probably accurate, but she was just so hurtful and mean sometimes I didn’t entirely enjoy reading scenes with her in them. Ultimately it got easier, but that was the sore spot for me in this book.
To be honest, it might not have been the best idea to read this book as the sixth anniversary of my dad’s death approaches, but I was really captivated by the beauty of the emotions Allison Hammer captured. Sure, my eyes were red afterward, but reading You and Me and Us was worth the emotional trauma.
Thanks to William Morrow Books for the Bookstagram giveaway through which I won a copy of this book!
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