I’ve been a longtime admirer of picture book author and illustrator Elisha Cooper, whose books include the beautifully impressionistic BEACH and MAGIC THINKS BIG, about a cat who has an outsize imagination but lacks follow-through. So when I saw that Cooper was publishing a memoir for adults, FALLING, I was intrigued. It turns out that this is his  second memoir: his first, CRAWLING, was a chronicle of his first year of fatherhood.

At the beginning of FALLING, that baby, Zoë, is now a big girl, almost five, and attending a Chicago Cubs game with her dad. It’s weeks before their family (which now includes younger sister Mia, almost three) moves from Chicago to New York City, where Cooper’s wife is about to start a faculty position at NYU. But the entire family’s life is about to change in an instant, when Cooper reaches across his daughter’s body and feels a large lump, like an extra rib, on the side of her chest.

"With meditations on memory, loyalty, and the gifts parents and children give one another, FALLING is every bit as relevant to parents in general as it is essential to parents facing challenges similar to those that Cooper’s family is dealing with."

Anxious days and many tests later, the family learns that Zoë has a type of kidney cancer called Wilms’ tumor, which one of their doctors calls a “good cancer,” whatever that means. Soon their lives revolve around surgery, trips to the hospitals in Chicago and New York for radiation and chemotherapy treatments, and, eventually, the quarterly scans that will reveal if the cancer has returned.

Cooper’s lovely, brief but wide-ranging memoir focuses not only on how these dramatic changes disrupt their family life and change the character of Zoë’s childhood; it also explores how Zoë’s illness and recovery exacerbate Cooper’s tendency toward anger and outrage when words fail him, his impatience, his fierce protectiveness of his own parenting philosophies. All of these are depicted as both strengths and weaknesses: “The only sane and human response when faced with a dangerous and unfair world is to rage against it, to attack everything that would harm those we love, and to fight for them with a wild and protective fury.”

With meditations on memory, loyalty, and the gifts parents and children give one another, FALLING is every bit as relevant to parents in general as it is essential to parents facing challenges similar to those that Cooper’s family is dealing with. It also offers glimpses into Cooper’s creative process, his approach to humor, and even his personal and professional relationship with the great picture book author and artist Maurice Sendak. FALLING takes readers into a world most never want to imagine and wish didn’t exist, but it also shows us that hope, laughter, strength and insight can flourish there as well as anywhere.