Everything Is a Little Broken

Aging is hard, but watching those you love get older isn’t much easier.

When Leonard Cohen sang, “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” he might have been describing the Frank and Cayne families in Rebecca Sugar’s poignant, touching, funny, and profound debut novel.

Everything Is a Little Broken invites readers to both laugh and cry at some of the painful, heart-wrenching, and absurd moments Mira Cayne and her father, Matt Frank, experience as age and infirmity begin to take their toll. Their story will be instantly recognizable to the 41 million Americans caring for older adults in their lives.

Matt has always been Mira’s hero and her rock, but he isn’t bouncing back easily from his second spinal cord surgery at the age of 79. As he grows increasingly fragile, Mira looks for ways to revive his spirit, and her own. Luckily, her father is still impossibly stubborn, and can take a good wheelchair joke. Laughing at what life is doing to his dignity seems to be the only medicine with any healing power, for both father and daughter.

They can’t laugh at everything, though. Mae, Mira’s beloved nanny, is dying. She has a 74-year history with the Frank family and is a maternal figure to both Mira and her father. Mae’s abiding Pentecostal faith inspires Mira as she tries to excavate and reexamine her own Jewish commitment, which lapsed years ago.

As all the relationships around her are changing, Mira will have to confront the question that comes for all of us: “Who will I be when the older generation is gone?”

Faced with nothing but time during the COVID-19 lockdown, Sugar chose the vehicle of fiction to express universal truths about the challenges she was facing with her own father. Together they have laughed about everything from neuropathy to nurses to hearing aids. It helps to remember that everything is a little broken.