Creatures of a Day

"All of us are creatures of a day,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “rememberer and remembered alike.” In his long-awaited new collection of stories, renowned psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom describes his patients’ struggles—as well as his own—to come to terms with the two great challenges of existence: how to have a meaningful life, and how to reckon with its inevitable end. In these pages...

"All of us are creatures of a day,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “rememberer and remembered alike.” In his long-awaited new collection of stories, renowned psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom describes his patients’ struggles—as well as his own—to come to terms with the two great challenges of existence: how to have a meaningful life, and how to reckon with its inevitable end. In these pages, we meet a nurse, angry and adrift in a morass of misery where she has lost a son

to a world of drugs and crime, and yet who must comfort the more privileged through their own pain; a successful businessman who, in the wake of a suicide, despairs about the gaps and secrets that infect every relationship; a newly

minted psychologist whose study of the human condition damages her treasured memories of a lost friend; and a man whose rejection of philosophy forces even Yalom himself into a crisis of confidence. Their names and stories will linger

long after the book’s last page is turned.

Irvin D. Yalom is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and a psychiatrist in private practice in San Francisco. He is the author of many books, including Love’s Executioner, Theory and Practice in Group Psychotherapy, and When Nietzsche Wept.