Kate Montclair is dying. She has arrived at late middle age loveless, childless, and having failed to achieve the career dreams of her youth. Now diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, she sees the next fourteen months of suffering as an intolerable prospect. Desperate to avoid excruciating suffering and the indignities of so-called palliative care, the terminally ill Kate Montclair secretly plans to break Virginia law with an assisted suicide–but she isn’t prepared for the passion for life a “good death” can inspire.
Daniel McInerny is a novelist and dramatist as well as associate professor and chair of the philosophy department at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. In March of this year he published, with Chrism Press, his novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair, which his fellow Catholic novelist Maya Sinha has called “an instant classic of 21st-century Catholic fiction.” In June 2024 Word on Fire Academic will bring out his scholarly monograph, The Way of Beauty: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts, and in the fall of 2024 his play, The Actor, on the early life and underground wartime dramatic activities of Karol Wojtyla, the man who would become Saint John Paul II, will premiere at Christendom College. Visit his Substack, The Comic Muse, for more of his reflections on philosophy, the arts, technology, and culture.
