WELLNESS ANGLE: This odyssey through New Age shenanigans and woo woo remedies will appeal to pseudoscience skeptics and anyone who has ever scoffed at Goop.

TWIST ON GRIEF MEMOIR: Many have chronicled the universal experience of the loss of a parent, but the circumstances and complicated psychology of this story are entirely unique.

QUEER THEME: Rachel identifies as genderqueer, and being unconventional/alternative/“different” is a thread connecting them to their mother throughout the book.

MEDIA-SAVVY AUTHOR: Rachel is funny, charming, and eager to self-promote. Their years as a radio producer on CBC Radio’s Q have provided them with both media experience and connections.

READER’S GUIDE: Discussion questions will be added for the new paperback edition.

RACHEL MATLOW (they/them) was a long-time producer on the arts and culture program Q on CBC Radio, where they also worked on Spark and The Sunday Edition. Their audio documentary “Dead Mom Talking” won a 2016 Third Coast award and a 2017 Gabriel award. They have written for The Globe and Mail, National Post, and The Believer. They play chess every weekend and are forever planning their next long-distance hike.



Author Residence: Toronto

Author Hometown: Toronto

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
SHORTLISTED for the 2021 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
SHORTLISTED for the 2021 Vine Award in Non-Fiction

Praise for Dead Mom Walking:

“[I]ntimate and often hilarious.”
—CBC

“This book is perfect. Dead Mom Walking is a deeply funny, incredibly smart, and moving page-turner…I just can’t get over what a stunning achievement it is.”
—Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People

“One of the most powerful stories I’ve read in a long time—intimate, astonishing, harrowing, and redemptive. Dead Mom Walking is such an important book, with lessons for everybody…I can’t get it out of my head.”
—Plum Johnson, author of They Left Us Everything
 
“The characters are so charming you’ll simultaneously want to read the whole thing in one sitting and slow down so you can spend more time with them. Dead Mom Walking will break your heart and then mend it. Read this book; call your mom.”
—Scaachi Koul, author of One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
 
“An exquisite paean to the mother-child bond. Rachel’s love for her mother is beautifully expressed from the first page of the book to the last.”
—Catherine Gildiner, author of Good Morning, Monster

“This brilliant memoir had me sobbing and in stitches in equal parts…Dead Mom Walking cuts right to the heart.”
—Tegan Quin of Tegan and Sara
 
“How am I laughing at someone’s mother’s cancer? How? We think we can’t laugh about death, about cancer, about our mothers and their suffering…and we can’t, but we can. And there’s so much relief in that. I laughed, I cried, I laughed and laughed and laughed.”
—Carolyn Taylor, Baroness von Sketch Show

“Dead Mom Walking’s jaw-dropping trick is the magically unbiased way it tells the whole story of its subject’s life. Matlow’s kind, determined humour shows it’s possible to endure the irreversible: the loss of the first love of so many lives—our mother. Intricately loving.”
—Thea Lim, author of An Ocean of Minutes