Christine is pregnant with twins and reeling from her husband’s affair when her right breast engages in a mutiny. Delivering identical boys and a tumor on the same day, she believes the worst is over. Until the natural spring under her house — what the neighborhood kids call The Witch House — begins to rise. Desperate for solid ground, Christine’s desire for wisdom sweeps everything in its path—her parents’ memories of the historic flood of 1955 that devastated Connecticut’s upper and lower Housatonic River Valley, the impossible expectations of modern motherhood, and a chilling brush with medical gaslighting —reminding us that when the stakes include certain death, they cannot get any higher.
 
“FLOOD is a magical incantation with chiseled prose that cuts to the bone—bright, sharp, and thirst-quenching; I couldn’t get enough. Kalafus delivers a memoir of motherhood, medicine, and making it work by any means necessary—showing us that even when the waters rise, the flood itself may carry us forward.”
—Adrian Shirk: author of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, an NPR Best Book
 
“FLOOD is a brave book and a necessary one.”
—Michael Klein: Lambda Award Author of When I was a Twin
 
A clear-eyed memoir about what happens when cancer doesn’t wait for life, FLOOD confronts the tensions of marriage, womanhood, parenting, and illness with a fierce, poetic immediacy that calls forth the disconnect between the imagined life and the real. Mingling vivid descriptions of her pregnancy and cancer treatment with dream-like visitations from her childhood growing up in a Connecticut mill town, Kalafus bears witness to the medicalization of the female body through a lens both intimate and wise. Peppered with the author’s raw humor and frank admissions of doubt, this remarkable story is ultimately one of profound dignity and strength.
—Danielle Pieratti: Winner of the Connecticut Book Award and author of Approximate Body