Two-person ‘book club’ bonded son with mother as she battled pancreatic cancer

TORONTO – Will Schwalbe and his mother had always bonded over their love of reading, a passion that led them to create a unique two-person “book club” when Mary Anne Schwalbe was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer in October 2007.

The illness meant a lot of time at doctor appointments. And although family members took turns accompanying Mary Anne Schwalbe to such visits, it was Will Schwalbe who often ended up taking his mother to chemotherapy.

“That very first time I went with her to chemo, I sort of threw out: ‘Well, you know if we spend a lot of time together and talk about books it’s kind of like a book club,” recalls Schwalbe, 50.

“And she laughed and said: ‘Don’t book clubs need food?’ And I said no, no … it’ll be a foodless book club.’ And it started as a very lighthearted comment but then, very quickly, we realized that we really did have this two-person book club and we had the book club until she died … almost two years later.”

Those mother-son literary discussions are chronicled in Schwalbe’s “The End of Your Life Book Club,” which is in stores now and recently made the New York Times bestseller list.

The poignant memoir is a ode to the joy of books, as well as a tribute to Mary Anne Schwalbe, a beloved wife, mother, grandmother (and voracious reader!) who also worked tirelessly to advance the plight of refugees.

Many readers will want to have a pen and paper close at hand to jot down some of the roughly 50 titles that mother and son perused. Schwalbe does a deft job of explaining “why” the titles were important to the duo rather than simply describing what they are about (his background in publishing, he says, taught him that there’s nothing more boring than relating the plot of a book).

They made their book club selections, Schwalbe said, “the way real people read.”

“You know those books you have by your bedside that you keep intending to read but haven’t read? We read those. We read new things (if) we saw a good review…. Mom had certain books she really wanted to re-read like T.S. Eliot’s ‘Murder in the Cathedral.’

“There were books everybody was talking about like ‘The Girl With Dragon Tattoo,’ so we read that. And then there were books that mom kind of wanted to steer me towards because they had things she wanted to talk about. For example, ‘Gilead’ by Marilynne Robinson was a big one … she wanted to talk to me about faith.”

Schwalbe says his mother — a devout Presbyterian — didn’t want to convert her agnostic son, but yearned for him to have the same comfort that she gleaned from her own faith.

Memoirs have exploded in popularity in recent years, with many of them chronicling horrific childhoods. That was in the back of Schwalbe’s mind as he crafted his loving tribute to his mother.

“It wasn’t my main motivation for writing the book but I was aware that the world is very well represented with memoirs by people who didn’t particularly like their moms,” he said.

“I think I’m more in the mainstream than not as someone who loved his mother and that’s part of what I wanted to write about.”

And what did Mary Anne Schwalbe herself make of her son’s project?

“In a very kind of stammering, inchoate way, a couple of months before she died, I said to her: ‘You know, Mom, I’d really like to write about you, about the books we’ve read, about the conversations we’ve had,'” said Schwalbe, CEO of the website Cookstr.com.

“And her immediate reaction was: ‘Why would you want to do that, surely there’s got to be something else you want to write about?’ And we never talked about it again, but the next day she sent me an email with a list of all the books we’d read and then after that, typical of my mother, was ‘Oh, don’t forget to talk about health-care reform, don’t forget to talk about that amazing refugee …from Sierra Leone.'”

Now, Schwalbe is quick to notice books that his mother would have loved, such as Vincent Lam’s “The Headmaster’s Wager,” which was recently nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award.

His rumination on the power of the printed page seems to have already struck a chord. Schwalbe says many readers of “The End of Your Life Book Club” have shared stories with him about books they’ve read with people they loved.

Some tell him they have their own unique book clubs, like the grandparent who is reading “The Hunger Games” along with a grandchild.

Says Schwalbe: “One of my favourite reactions was someone who finished the last page, picked up the phone, called their mother and said: ‘What are you reading?'”