Praise for Not Something We Discuss Often:

In Not Something We Discuss Often, Sarah Cedeño offers up “a more complicated vision” of a life—her life—one in which pain and joy co-exist. In prose that is both beautiful and brave, Cedeño confronts the daily indignities of living with a chronic and disabling illness and envisions a future of total dependence. Cedeño refuses to look away from the hard and inevitable truth and in doing so, she offers up instruction on how to live.

 —Sarah Freligh, author of We

When I first read Sarah Cedeño’s “Future Care Instructions for Your Wife with Multiple Sclerosis” in Brevity, I was stunned by the vulnerability, clarity, love, pain—and humor: “Ask me to shovel the walkway,” her future self tells her future husband, “and pretend I’ve done it.” In essays you’ll return to again and again, Cedeño makes space for everything, all together. Read her debut collection, Not Something We Discuss Often, and see how the path to navigate our broken, beautiful lives becomes brighter.

 —Jill Christman, author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays

In her book of essays, Not Something We Discuss Often, Sarah Cedeño writes, “Maybe I worried what kind of mess I’d become.”  Her worry drives these essays with strategic tentativeness and gentle self-effacement.  Bless the world for making her life a chaos of delicate family issues, chronic illness, and flawed, enduring love. She’s determined to get to the bottom of these things, and, of course, no one ever does. Her writing makes you thankful for that fact. We don’t want to stop reading these essays. 

—Steve Fellner, author of Eating Lightbulbs and All Screwed Up