Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Most Anticipated Books of 2025!

Summary and Reviews of Dear Life by Rachel Clarke

Dear Life by Rachel Clarke

Dear Life

A Doctor's Story of Love and Loss

by Rachel Clarke
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (8):
  • First Published:
  • Sep 1, 2020, 336 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

In Dear Life, palliative care specialist Dr. Rachel Clarke recounts her professional and personal journey to understand not the end of life, but life at its end.

Death was conspicuously absent during Rachel's medical training. Instead, her education focused entirely on learning to save lives, and was left wanting when it came to helping patients and their families face death. She came to specialize in palliative medicine because it is the one specialty in which the quality, not quantity of life truly matters.

In the same year she started to work in a hospice, Rachel was forced to face tragedy in her own life when her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He'd inspired her to become a doctor, and the stories he had told her as a child proved formative when it came to deciding what sort of medicine she would practice. But for all her professional exposure to dying, she remained a grieving daughter.

Dear Life follows how Rachel came to understand―as a child, as a doctor, as a human being―how best to help patients in the final stages of life, and what that might mean in practice.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Reading British doctor Rachel Clarke's memoir about her life and career in palliative care, I felt a sense of the support I wish I'd had then. Dear Life should be in hospital waiting rooms, in chemotherapy clinics, in doctors' offices where the bad news might come today or next week. I am relieved to discover this complete, gentle understanding of what my family and I went through when my father was dying. Clarke is an unassuming healer now for the thousands, or even millions of people that I hope will read this book...continued

Full Review (759 words)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by Rory L. Aronsky).

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



Cicely Saunders and Palliative Care

Cicely SaundersIn Dear Life, Dr. Rachel Clarke recalls being inspired to shift her medical career from emergency room work to palliative care after serving as a fierce advocate for Pat, her fiancé's dying mother. Cicely Saunders is widely credited with creating palliative care as we know it today. So what inspired Saunders to pursue this particular path?

Saunders was born in Barnet in North London in 1918. As a child she was afflicted by a crooked spine, a condition that caused considerable pain. She was also taller than all the other girls at her boarding school. These circumstances produced an affinity for outsiders that informed the rest of her life and her career.

Saunders wanted to be a nurse, but her father was staunchly against it, so ...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Dear Life, try these:

  • The Schubert Treatment jacket

    The Schubert Treatment

    by Claire Oppert

    Published 2024

    About this book

    A celebrated art therapist plays the cello for her patients—and offers a moving reflection on the extraordinary power of music to enrich our lives, all the way to the very end.

  • The Unwinding of the Miracle jacket

    The Unwinding of the Miracle

    by Julie Yip-Williams

    Published 2020

    About this book

    As a young mother facing a terminal diagnosis, Julie Yip-Williams began to write her story, a story like no other. What began as the chronicle of an imminent and early death became something much more - a powerful exhortation to the living.

We have 5 read-alikes for Dear Life, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Rachel Clarke
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Bluest Eye
    by Toni Morrison
    The story of a black girl in America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others. First published 1970; won the 1993 Nobel Prize.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Beast of the North Woods
    by Annelise Ryan

    When a local fisherman is mauled to death, it seems like the only possible cause is a mythical creature.

  • Book Jacket

    Three Days in June
    by Anne Tyler

    A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

  • Book Jacket

    Harlem Rhapsody
    by Victoria Christopher Murray

    The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance.

Who Said...

The worst thing about reading new books...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

D to T N

and be entered to win..