A Review of Julie Yip-Williams The Unwinding of a Miracle (Random House 2019).

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Julie Yip-Williams The Unwinding of a Miracle (Random House 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

This memoir absolutely destroyed me (in the best possible way). From what I understand, it was originally written as a series of blog posts. Eventually, Julie Yip-Williams was able to make a contact in the publishing industry who helped land her a book deal. We’ll let B&N do some work for us at this point:

“That Julie Yip-Williams survived infancy was a miracle. Born blind in Vietnam, she narrowly escaped euthanasia at the hands of her grandmother, only to flee with her family the political upheaval of her country in the late 1970s. Loaded into a rickety boat with three hundred other refugees, Julie made it to Hong Kong and, ultimately, America, where a surgeon at UCLA gave her partial sight. She would go on to become a Harvard-educated lawyer, with a husband, a family, and a life she had once assumed would be impossible. Then, at age thirty-seven, with two little girls at home, Julie was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began. The Unwinding of the Miracle is the story of a vigorous life refracted through the prism of imminent death. When she was first diagnosed, Julie Yip-Williams sought clarity and guidance through the experience and, finding none, began to write her way through it—a chronicle that grew beyond her imagining. Motherhood, marriage, the immigrant experience, ambition, love, wanderlust, tennis, fortune-tellers, grief, reincarnation, jealousy, comfort, pain, the marvel of the body in full rebellion—this book is as sprawling and majestic as the life it records. It is inspiring and instructive, delightful and shattering. It is a book of indelible moments, seared deep—an incomparable guide to living vividly by facing hard truths consciously. With humor, bracing honesty, and the cleansing power of well-deployed anger, Julie Yip-Williams set the stage for her lasting legacy and one final miracle: the story of her life.”

What is apparent from this work is that Yip-Williams does not take any sentimental view toward her cancer diagnosis. She is rather matter-of-fact that she is dying. With this acceptance in mind, Yip-Williams goes through the work of what it means to prepare for her death. She wants to leave behind a form of record for her daughters, in particular, who are quite young, to give them a sense of how she lived (rather than just how she died). The extraordinary element that comes immediately through this memoir is Yip-Williams’s desire to extract full presence out of every moment: she has an indelible sense that every second can matter. This level of awareness is breathtaking to behold in the written word. It is inspiring as a reminder that, whatever the conditions of our health, we should aim for this type of presence: to understand always that the future is finite, so we must take command of the choices that we have the power to make. Have your box of tissues ready. I’m serious. Get them now.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-unwinding-of-the-miracle-julie-yip-williams/1128906154#/

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Nicholas Clark

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!

Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at sohnucr@gmail.com
Nicholas Clark, PhD Student in English, at nclar004@ucr.edu

comments