Winner of the 2013 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, Like Any Normal Day is a profound, powerful narrative of a golden boy's tragedy, a woman's unlived life, and a brother's complicated devotion.
In the mid-1970s, brothers Buddy and Jimmy Miley were close, both on the verge of impressive athletic careers. A promising high school quarterback, Buddy's potential was cut short by an injury that left him quadriplegic. Immobile and imprisoned in his body for decades, Buddy would watch life pass by from his wheelchair, living at home under his mother's and brother's care, and wondering what his life could have been.
Buddy and Jimmy visited special hospitals and traveled to Lourdes in search of a miracle, never losing hope as they searched for a cure. But as Buddy suffered increasing pain, and also realized that he would never be able to walk again-and never prove himself capable of being loved by Karen, a woman he'd first met in high school-he asked Jimmy to help him end his life.
Beautifully written, both heart-wrenching and hopeful, Mark Kram Jr.'s Like Any Normal Day explores the important bonds between families and the depths of what we're willing to do for those we love.
Like Any Normal Day is the winner of the 2013 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing.
"Mark Kram, Jr. offers us an iconic story of the broken promises of youth, the ties that bind and blessings and curses that come with them. Kram honors these characters by giving the reader what was in their lives--the loss, the love, the rage, without commentary or apology. If you can't find yourself somewhere in this book, you're not looking hard enough."
Brad Falchuk, Co-Creator / Executive Producer of "Glee" and "American Horror Story."
"Like Any Normal Day looks piercingly beyond the moment when the lights dim and the crowds go home in any young athlete's life. Kram's acuity and sympathies stretch far beyond his sportswriter's practiced gaze -- indeed, all the way to the realm of literature. It is not a happy story he has to tell us. But it seems to me -- perhaps for that very reason -- it is an essential and cautionary one."
Richard Ford
"There is nothing normal about Like Any Normal Day. In the spirit of his late father, Mark Kram Jr. has stripped away the mythology and stereotypes of the sporting world and found something deeper, the complicated truth of a profound and haunting story."
David Maraniss, author of When Pride Still Mattered
