Goodbye, Vitamin

At 30, Ruth loses her longtime lover and decides to move home to help care for her father as he slips into dementia. Over the course of a year, in laconic, diary-style entries, she reckons with her father’s infidelity and drinking, her parents’ near-divorce, her brother’s estrangement and her own lack of career or partner. As father and daughter rediscover each other, passages from a journal he kept about Ruth’s early years offer a poignant parallel to her adult chronicle. Like most diaries, Khong’s debut dabbles in the mundane yet she also affectingly logs the absurd, comic and awful extremes of Alzheimer’s. Jeffrey Burke