How to Move On

How to Move On: An Unfinished Memoir of Loss, Love, and Surviving Your Family is Joel Yanofsky’s final, deeply personal work—an unfinished yet profoundly moving meditation on grief, love, and the complexities of family. Known for his wit and insight, Yanofsky grapples with the loss of his beloved sisters and parents, all while navigating the joys and challenges of marriage, fatherhood, and a writing life.

This posthumously completed book, pieced together by close friends and literary collaborators Bryan Demchinsky and Elaine Kalman Naves, expands on the themes explored in Bad Animals, his acclaimed memoir about raising his autistic son. Here, Yanofsky turns inward, confronting the weight of cumulative loss while celebrating the enduring bonds of love. With self-deprecating humor and keen eye, he finds meaning in the rituals of mourning, the absurdities of everyday life, and the unspoken tensions within families.

At once tender and sharp, How to Move On is a poignant farewell from a writer who never shied away from difficult truths. It is a book about death, yes, but it is equally a book about life—its messiness, its unpredictability, and the people who make it worth living.

REVIEWS

“At the time he received his cancer diagnosis, Yanofsky had already lost his parents and his two older sisters, with whom he had been very close. (A thread in the book, equal parts funny and sad, recounts how he and his siblings would find themselves, at various times, back living at their modest childhood home in working-class Chomedey, long past the point where they thought they had moved out for good.) Everyone involved in this tight-knit milieu is granted a true writer’s full attention in the book; even family dogs get portraits every bit as nuanced and worthy of scrutiny as whatever the nearest humans might be doing…How to Move On is further proof, if any is needed, that Yanofsky was a master of the fraught art of writing about family — and, almost inevitably, about loss.” -Ian McGillis, Montreal Gazette

“This posthumous collection, expertly edited by Elaine Kalman Naves and Bryan Demchinsky,gathers fourteen personal reflections … the mood of How to Move On is reflective and intensely personal. Gone are Yanofsky’s usual perspectives on writers and writing. Present now are his wise and challenging thoughts as he tries to put down his own commentaries on his existence.” – David Staines, Literary Review of Canada