Maybe

Maybe is an original memoir about a young woman living with uncertainty. Diagnosed with an unspecified autoimmune illness at the age of twenty, she enters a new life that is given shape by her fears about her own mortality, as she tries to identify her symptoms and determine their severity. She also faces the reverberations of her father's young death and his own struggle with a chronic illness. While revisiting scenes from her childhood in rural Vermont and her college years in Boston, the author contrasts the sometimes-hero figure of the father with an emotionally distant boyfriend. The author explores what happens when a young person accepts illness as a state of being, and assigns meaning to the different and sometimes eerily similar ways she and her father react to being ill.