If individuals are like cities, our loved ones are the skyline: buildings that shape our identity, that we use to map our understanding of ourselves from different angles. Binnie Kirshenbaum’s novel Counting Backwards looks at what happens when the building that the rest of our city, self, and life is built around comes crumbling down.
Addison and her husband Leo have been together for decades. Addie is a collage artist repped by a small but respectable Manhattan gallery, and Leo is a research scientist who at 53 finds himself in the early stages of Lewy body disease, a form of dementia. The story begins with Leo hallucinating Mahatma Gandhi stirring a pot of lentils under a streetlight. The street hallucinations steadily progress to angels, acting troupes, and men on stilts. Then come the audio hallucinations: a little laughing girl Addie supposedly invited over to play who suddenly disappears; a neighbor mysteriously breaking into the apartment to use their bathroom at 3 a.m. Leo forgets how to turn on his computer. He claims that every ATM is broken and that the train he took home derailed. He becomes a burden to his university colleagues and must leave his position. Addie’s job when they first got together was waiting tables, but Leo, a tenured researcher, encouraged her to pursue her art full-time since his salary was “plenty for the two of [them]”. Years later, faced with having to provide care for the man who had promised to take care of her, Addie pushes away the strange present she cannot abide and the past she misses in favor of a future where both versions of her husband are gone for good.
Each “chapter” is only ever a few pages long at most, which feels right considering how untenable Addie’s resilience turns out to be. Even before Leo surprises her with behavior that suggests he would be better off in a care facility, Addie is already hoping for some way to detach from him. The man who loved and knew her is dissolving before her eyes, and therefore, so is she. The book is a second-person report from Addie’s perspective of her husband’s transformation, with interjections here and there recalling a bygone Leo. When he eventually settles into a newer self, being looked after by a woman Addie pays to provide care for him in her stead, it becomes clear that, whether or not Leo is suffering on some level, Addie definitely is. After two unsuccessful stints in care facilities, Addie rents out a second apartment a few blocks from the one she and Leo once shared for him to reside in with his aide. Addie visits him daily, but often takes care not to touch him aside from hugging him hello and goodbye or offering a peck on the cheek. She does not fight to have him around her. His aide, Larissa, thinks very highly of this Leo, saying more than once that he is a good man. Smiles and laughter are easy between them while Addie must watch from the outside, a third wheel in her own marriage.
A surprising amount remains unsaid in this story. One thing that roots Addie’s depicted helplessness in a relatable reality despite little in the way of introspection on it is her guilt-ridden spending habits when it comes to Leo’s care. The university agrees to continue paying his salary for another year, most of which Addie spends on the two care facilities and then Larissa’s salary, rent, and daily expenses. Addie takes issue when the credit card bill reveals Larissa has been doing her grocery shopping at Whole Foods and has purchased a new skillet from Williams Sonoma, but says nothing, preferring to scale back her own existence as a means of continued survival since she lacks marketable skills. Presumably, this is because she has decidedly put as much distance between herself and this new Leo as possible, never entertaining the thought of care that would allow the two of them to continue sharing a home and a life. When Leo, at a point of significant decline, tells Addie that he still likes her but “I’m with her now” (“her” being Larissa), Addie responds not with possessiveness, but with desperation to keep Larissa—who had planned to stay only three weeks before returning home to Jamaica—on as his carer. As far as Addie is concerned, there is no Leo to take possession of. Even in alienating their former friends, who are apparently at a loss for how to deal with Leo’s condition beyond pretending he no longer exists, Addie is protecting a Leo who has in fact ceased to exist. A memory. But her staunch defense of the man she remembers only emphasizes the similarity between her and her ex-friends: both would rather pretend the man Leo has become is far removed from them.
Jealousy does rear its head briefly when Larissa mentions washing Leo’s hair as he showers. Addie laments “their intimacy” and “all the other secrets they share, secrets kept, secrets stolen away” from her. But after letting that feeling propel her to hug him tightly, a sudden vision of “Larissa lathering soap in her hands, washing his naked body” kills Addie’s yearning. Yes, the disease did rob her of the connection she and her husband once shared, but Addie makes no effort to forge a new one. Apparently it’s all or nothing, and Addie’s “all” left with the Leo she used to know. Lewy body disease turns Leo into a man who literally licks his plate clean after a good meal, dances willingly, and laughs when dogs lick his fingers. But this childlike joy is lost on Addie, who is unmoored and refuses to find purchase in a new land. His role in her life becomes something like that of a much beloved relative with whom she has lost touch, but would rather not speak with again for fear of disturbing their beautiful past. Strangely, Addie does not reflect much on this topic either, which—conversely to her financial habits—has the effect of putting the reader’s empathy for her at risk. Perhaps Addie’s feelings toward the new Leo are shameful to her (as some chapters suggest), but since it’s her perspective we occupy, it becomes increasingly hard to believe anyone could be that good at hiding the truth of such feelings, however shameful, from themselves completely.
Counting Backwards abounds in moments of beauty, humor, and tragedy. The situation the novel presents is as complex as the experience of grief itself. Though certain big emotions go unplumbed in favor of conveying the daily intricacies of an upended life, readers who are up to the task can put themselves in Addie’s shoes in order to fill those gaps and begin to learn how they might face similar pain. A worthy exercise indeed.
FICTION
Counting Backwards
By Binnie Kirshenbaum
Soho Press
Published March 25, 2025
