What is the best book you have ever read? Let me tell y’all, in case you have not heard about this one released earlier this year: The Unwinding of the Miracle by Julie Yip-Williams is a gift to every human, from a dying young mother who teaches us how to live our best life. It made it to the top of my list before I’d even finished the book. This book sticks to your soul. Julie tells her incredible story, which has a startling beginning and is full of miracles and impossibilities all along the way.
As a young mother to two girls, she is faced with a terminal diagnosis. She chronicled her journey on a blog that was later turned into this New York Times bestseller. About the book:
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.
The Unwinding of the Miracle is deeply sad, but her insights and story will bring out new happiness and joy in you.
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