Home Is Burning: A Memoir

Written by Dan Marshall

Narrated by Dan Marshall

For the Marshalls, laughter is the best medicine. Especially when combined with alcohol, pain pills, excessive cursing, sexual escapades, actual medicine, and more alcohol.

Meet Dan Marshall. 25, good job, great girlfriend, and living the dream life in sunny Los Angeles without a care in the world. Until his mother calls. And he ignores it, as you usually do when Mom calls. Then she calls again. And again.

Dan thought things were going great at home. But it turns out his mom's cancer, which she had battled throughout his childhood with tenacity and a mouth foul enough to make a sailor blush, is back. And to add insult to injury, his loving father has been diagnosed with ALS.

Sayonara L.A., Dan is headed home to Salt Lake City, Utah.

Never has there been a more reluctant family reunion: His older sister is resentful, having stayed closer to home to bear the brunt of their mother's illness. His younger brother comes to lend a hand, giving up a journalism career and evenings cruising Chicago gay bars. His next younger sister, a sullen teenager, is a rebel with a cause. And his baby sister - through it all - can only think about her beloved dance troop. Dan returns to shouting matches at the dinner table, old flames knocking at the door, and a speech device programmed to help his father communicate that is as crude as the rest of them. But they put their petty differences aside and form Team Terminal, battling their parents' illnesses as best they can, when not otherwise distracted by the chaos that follows them wherever they go. Not even the family cats escape unscathed.

As Dan steps into his role as caregiver in Home Is Burning, wheelchair wrangler, and sibling referee, he watches pieces of his previous life slip away, and comes to realize that the further you stretch the ties that bind, the tighter they hold you together.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Oct 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781427264770

Dan Marshall

DAN MARSHALL grew up in a nice home with nice parents in Salt Lake City, Utah, before attending UC Berkeley. After college, Dan worked at a strategic communications public relations firm in Los Angeles. At 25 he left work and returned to Salt Lake to take care of his sick parents. While caring for them, he started writing detailed accounts about many of their weird, sad, funny adventures. Home Is Burning is his first book.

Reviews for Home Is Burning

[bogopea · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Wow, so not what I was expecting. Dan Marshall and his siblings move home to take care of 2 parents with terminal diseases. The father dies of ALS before the end of the book. The mother continues her tortuous lifetime journey of battling cancer. Marshall is very open about the defects and issues of each family member, including himself but it's really too much information. He may have needed to write the story to keep his sanity but he didn't have to publish it. It was a privileged lifestyle in Utah, they thought they were better than the Mormons, and the kids even in their 20's were still dependent on their parents emotionally and financially. However, the family was close knit and Marshall's love for his parents especially shines through. But it's a raunchy, offensive ride and I ended up skimming over the middle of the book as I got the idea from the first and last few chapters.

[Ashley · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My dad has ALS. This book was cathartic. The real voice of of so many affected. Thank you.

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

nonfiction/memoir (caring for terminally ill parents with lots of swearing, drinking and some drug use--also, some opinions about Mormons are shared). Wouldn't think a book like this could be hilarious, but I definitely had to laugh out loud during some parts.

[susandennis-139327 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I marked this as read but I only 'read' half. I first picked up the Kindle version from the library and was so taken with the first chapter, that I bought the audible version. The reader is not a talented one and the voice he gave the book was way different than the one on the page. But, the main problem was that halfway in the story and the writing also collapsed. I quit.

[mhanover10 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

First off, if you are offended by swearing, don't read this book because there is a ton. What a horrible thing to go through. Dan tells the story of when his Mom was going through cancer treatment and their Dad was diagnosed with ALS and eventually died from the disease. It's a very frank and brutally honest look at how a family copes with two parents dying.

[lycaenidae-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Highly recommend

[lanamarie-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

My hopes for this book came crashing down shortly after starting when I realized that it would just be a memoir of how shitty these people are. Do I feel bad that the parents were both terminally ill? Sure, I'm not heartless. But what I feel worse about is how absolutely terrible the family treats each other. I mostly found myself angry that any of them found their behavior to be appropriate, and maybe it's funny and kitschy from the inside, growing up with that sense of humor, but from a readers perspective it just got annoyingly show-off-ish (which is exactly how Dan Marshall seems to be anyhow). "Look at us swear, look at us be vulgar, look at us say dumb things at inappropriate times". Yeah, no thanks. Not my style.

[kremsa-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have very mixed feelings about this book. A lot of it I enjoyed and could relate to and other times I found the book to be somewhat off putting and the foul language excessive. Home is Burning is Dan Marshall's memoir of his year of moving back home to help care for his father who is dying from Lou Gerhig's disease. His mother is battling cancer and has been on and off for a good part of his life. He has a sister with Aspergers, a brother who is gay and another adopted Native American sister who appears to have a drinking problem. I can't imagine having to deal with all of this all at the same time and Dan's story about how he and his family did is sometimes inspirational and sometimes rather dysfunctional. I appreciate that Dan used humor as his coping mechanism but sometimes it seemed a bit cruel and went too far. Kudos to him for being honest about it! My mother suffered for years from a severe form of MS and I often cared for her doing things I felt no daughter should have to ever do for their parent so I can relate to a lot of Dan's story about the intimate details of what caring for his father entailed. What I did like about the book is that I could see how much Dan loved his dad and his family.