Bec, a college student, has an excellent teacher in the kitchen. Kate “used to love to cook” but now has ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), uses a wheelchair at thirty-six years old, and requires twenty-four-hour care. Bec is her caregiver. When not working, Bec is sleeping with a married professor and skipping most of her classes at U. Madison. She’s a bumbler, a little tactless. She wanders into things without fully considering the consequences. “What were you?” she asks bluntly at one point, meaning Kate, meaning pre-ALS. But it’s an honest question, and Bec’s lack of self-censorship suits Kate. Worse would be condescension.

Wildgen efficiently delineates the care giving logistics—what Kate can and can’t do for herself and how others do things for her (showers, grooming, meals). Kate is “lined with plastic,” meaning she has a feeding valve with a plug, “the kind that holds air inside water wings.” Because Kate’s speech is labored, Bec learns to interpret for her, and the translation is well-executed by Wildgen—apt subtitles seem unobtrusive ten minutes in.

We’re then free to focus on the juicier details. Kate has distinct preferences—in decorating, in music, in books, in marriage. She reads Alice Munro and smokes pot. She kicks out her husband and uses a vibrator. (“Was there a website or catalog out there that specialized in sexual fulfillment for the disabled?” Bec wonders. “[T]here should be.”) We begin to see Kate as Bec does: complicated, attractive, refined.“I felt an absurd pride in Kate, her beauty and the flash of her grin and this pretty house.” Bec willingly adopts “the aesthetics of Kate”—the wine and spices her boss...