“Contact Points”: Alive Day by Karie Fugett reviewed by Andria Williams
Alive Day
Karie Fugett
The Dial Press, Random House, 2025
336 pp.
Alive Day by Karie Fugett is perhaps the best memoir I have read in the last year. It chronicles her husband, Cleve's, deployment to Iraq, his subsequent devastating injury, and the four years after in which he tried to survive, alternating between lugging an IV pole of antibiotics around everywhere, to a stint at Walter Reed after his eventual amputation. This all seems grim, but the story is so much more.
Fugett is able to write in a way that brims with life. From her early love with Cleve, to the worry and constant caretaking of him post-injury, to the absolutely harrowing recounting of his near-fatal overdose, to her contacting a medium who tells him he wanted to be cremated and turned into a dildo (later, in a delightful bittersweet scene, confirmed by one of his unit mates who saw the returned paperwork), love just throbs from these pages. As Fugett spends months between Bethesda Naval Hospital and, later, Walter Reed, I was amazed by the tenacity and devotion of these caretakers. I shuddered as Fugett read down an itemized list of how much wounded veterans could receive per lost body part, how OxyContin (manufactured by Purdue, now discontinued) was marketed in deceptive ways that downplayed its potential for addiction, how Karie navigated a cheapskate military bureaucracy to make sure her husband got full compensation for his lost limb. Their sneaky sex on a hospital bed made me happy for them, their shared jokes and comfort were beautifully painful in contrast to Cleve's descent into depression, their fights when they so obviously loved one another. I have worked with amputees and I thought about what we call "contact points": where the prosthetic touches the human leg. How war tried to drive wedge after wedge between Cleve and other people, between him and his wife, his friends. How they still strove for those contact points.
If I could pick a late-summer read with love, and recent history, and a heart wishing for peace — and, amazingly, a hopeful ending — I would recommend Alive Day by Karie Fugett.
Andria Williams is the author of the novels The Longest Night and The Waiting World. She is founder of the Military Spouse Book Review and was former editor-in-chief of The Wrath Bearing Tree literary journal, which she is proud to note — in its over ten-year tradition of supporting service members, military families, and anyone affected by war or violence — just published, independently, an interview and excerpt from Karie Fugett.