A happily married woman abruptly flees home and family after receiving a dire health diagnosis. As Bree Durning rejects all offers of help and instead becomes preoccupied with her own blindsiding memories, even her psychologist-trained husband is tested to his limits as he struggles to ease his wife’s pain. Please enjoy Inside Our Days  which asks, 'How can we be expected to face death with any courage, if we haven't yet figured out our lives?'  This is just one of many questions I found myself exploring in the story of Bree and William Durning. I urge you to take from the text anything else which pleases or intrigues. I thank you for whatever time and consideration you give to this story and am grateful for your interest.  If you are willing and could leave a customer review after reading the book,   your insights would be most appreciated.  When Bree Durning's ovarian cancer reoccurs, everything she and husband Will believed about their life together is upended and Bree finds herself heading down a path that Will cannot follow or even understand. Michele Merens has given us a sensitive and beautifully rendered portrait of a marriage in extremis. -Yona Zeldis McDonough, Fiction Editor, Lilith Magazine Inside Our Day s is a deep dive into family history, memory, trauma and care that swept me up and carried me...I read this book in two breathless days then looked up, blinking, to find myself delivered back into my own life. Michele Merens knows something about how memory and love both can morph, twist, slip, away from us and come back again changed and still present. And the strength and courage it takes to continue to choose to walk out into the world, one day at a time. -Sarah Sadie, author of We Are Traveling Through Dark At Tremendous Speeds Michele Merens has written a beautifully tender novel about the ways sick people sometimes hurt the ones they love. However, it is also a novel that probes, with raw, unflinching courage, how the selflessness of the living, who come like supplicants confused and full of need, can become selfishness to those dying slowly. In the end, though we know none return from the dark shore, we are left with the notion that one must, like a magpie, "build a universe out of whatever is small and precious and catches your eye." -Carlo Matos, author of The Quitters Michele Merens is a writer and playwright. She is a 2020 NYT Nuit de Philosophy Op-ed winner and presenter (Brooklyn Public Library), a Puffin Grant recipient, and a Barnard College Senior Scholar in Creative Writing. Her dramatic work is archived in the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Madison, WI and she is a member of the Dramatist's Guild. She holds a BA from Barnard College and MSJ from Northwestern University.