In Mary Jane Nealon’s gorgeous new book, In the Form of Bread, she recounts her years of working as a nurse as a sacred and audacious training ground where she let beauty and frailty be her lodestones into the realm of forgetting oneself as a way of finding oneself. The essays here can be seen as a primer for what it means to live a compassionate life, but also what it means to live asking the question—as she writes in one essay—“what price do we pay in our own lives when we offer ourselves to each other wholeheartedly?”....If risk is extra life, then, as she says in another essay: “Part of being human is being open to the idea of being more than human.” In the Form of Bread is a wonderment and a confirmation that helping others is how we keep the circle of humanity unbroken. 

—Michael Klein

In her lyrical memoir, Beautiful Unbroken, Mary Jane Nealon asked what care we owe one another. In her new book, a collection of vignettes both exquisitely detailed and widely resonant, heartbreaking and often hilarious, Nealon explores the joys and costs of caregiving. She brings a lifetime of wisdom as a nurse, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a lover, and a poet to the essential question: what does it mean to be human? In the Form of Bread is an astonishingly compassionate book—and so needed right now. 

—Suzanne Koven M.D. M.F.A.