WHY IS MY BRA STILL ON?

A sick woman asks her friends to help her die in Wasyliszyn’s debut novel.

Opal Slepecki has pancreatic cancer. Though she is not yet 55, Opal’s pancreas is “gold-star jacked up,” as she phrases it to her three best friends when they come over for drinks and macaroons in her gazebo. Having already exhausted all of her treatment options, Opal has decided the only course left for her is euthanasia—a serious crime in Minnesota—and she needs her friends’ help to do the deed. Her friends are understandably horrified, both by the revelation of her prognosis and by the requests Opal has written on cards and given to them. Luna, the beautiful, cake-baking neck model, has been tasked with collecting brown recluse spiders. Urse, the brash friend with a traumatic childhood and a burgeoning Adderall dependency, must find poison mushrooms. The loyal, possibly depressed Ruby is responsible for the most dramatic ingredient of all: heroin. The friends are worried that Opal has broken with reality—she seems unable to grasp the fact that her husband, Oliver, died six months ago—but they are willing to do whatever they can to help. (Well, almost anything.) As the pals begin their morbid scavenger hunt, a lifetime’s worth of traumas, hang-ups, missed opportunities, and unfulfilled dreams come bubbling to the surface. Shot through with penetrating insights on aging and loss, the novel is ultimately about friendships, particularly long ones. Wasyliszyn wrings plenty of humor out of her wonderfully human characters, particularly the ailing Opal: “Opal woke to the smell of flowers. I must be at my own funeral.” (When she realizes she is merely in a hospital bed, her visiting friends presenting her with a vase of lilacs, she shuts her eyes again, lamenting, “Aw, man, a hospital. The opposite of my funeral.”) In Opal’s case, the end of life is equal parts heist machinations and wry retrospective, with little time for treacly sentimentality.

A surprising and enjoyable novel about camaraderie and letting go.