When Hali’s father asks her to help him commit suicide to spare the family the misery of a long illness, she reluctantly agrees. Hali’s family insists on letting “God’s will” decide. Hali, brooding upon the idea of predetermination and an afterlife in a way that is both challenging and deeply moving, is ultimately unable to do what her father wishes. She is forced to accept the help of a manipulative male nurse, adding further complications and a slow and painful end.
About the Author
Victoria N. Alexander, Ph.D., is a literary fiction novelist who writes about censored and controversial subjects with audacity, humor, and compassion. Bravely working to overcome complacency and conformity and to promote critical and creative thinking, tolerance and peace, she uses Huck Finn’s infamous statement of resolve as her writing motto: “All right then, I’ll go to hell.”
Alexander is also a philosopher of science. She is a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center alum, a Public Scholar for the New York Council for the Humanities and a director at the Dactyl Foundation, working on new and emerging concepts in science and encouraging interaction between the sciences and the arts. Her latest work on the surprising non-utilitarian evolutionary mechanisms behind butterfly mimicry appears in Fine Lines: Nabokov’s Scientific Art (Yale University Press), which has been favorably reviewed in the New Yorker, Science, Smithsonian Magazine, Washington Post, the New Republic and others. Alexander’s fiction is published by Permanent. Her nonfiction is published by Emergent Publications.
