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Can we ever fully understand the experiences of others? Can we ever even know ourselves?

In November 2020, B.J. Hollars answered a call from his father-in-law while teaching. “When will you be home?” Steve asked. “I have news.” 

So began the Hollars family’s year of plenty—a cancer diagnosis on top of the ongoing COVID pandemic, then feelings of falling short as parents, partners, and people. While Hollars traces his family’s daily devastations alongside his father-in-law’s decline, he recounts the small mercies along the way: birthdays, campfires, fishing trips, kayaking, and fireflies. As he, his wife, Meredith, and their three young children grapple with how best to say goodbye to the person they love, they are forced to reassess their own lives. How can we make the most of our time, they wonder, when time feels so short?

Written in vignettes and accompanied by photographs and family interviews, Year of Plenty provides a poignant and unflinching account of how death separates us not only from the people we love but from places and memories too. Hollars explores how death’s all-consuming weight has the potential to fracture—rather than strengthen—even those relationships we think we know the best. Ultimately, he cracks wide personal moments from his own life and allows the world to peer in.​

Press & Praise 

"Every reader will see themselves in these pages, breaking their heart wide open...but it will also be a comfort...The grace that Hollars provides...is that no matter how ill-equipped we are to deal with death, in the end, if we live a life where we love well...that is the part that will ultimately remain."
--Emily Webber, Hippocampus Magazine

"The most beautiful series of intimate and honest vignettes of regular life that I have ever read.“
--Fort Wayne Magazine

"Hollars often recounts quotidian exchanges that carry the weight of existential questions."
--JoeAnn Hart, Terrain

"Fascinating, informative, candid, insightful, deeply personal and ultimately inspiring, "Year of Plenty” is one of those memoirs that will linger in the mind and memory of the reader long after the book has been finished and set back upon the shelf... [U]nique and unreservedly recommended.”
--Midwest Book Review 

“One of the most tender, big-hearted accounts of grief and love I’ve ever read, ‘Year of Plenty’ will joyfully, tearfully remind every reader of life’s bounty.”
--Tessa Fontaine, author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts & The Red Grove
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“I fell in love with this whole beautiful family—and then I took some of that cracked-open-heart tenderness back to my own dear ones.”
--Jill Christman, author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays

“It's a book about how to fail or think you've failed at everything, only to learn that's the stuff of life, and somehow you didn't, and somehow it keeps going, and somehow it's so damn beautiful, too.”
--Maggie Pahos, Good / Grief

"Year of Plenty is a quiet book, a personal book, an honest book.  B.J. Hollars, ever the teacher, lays groundwork for his readers, offering one version of what mindful dying looks like—not just for the one who is sick, but for everyone who loves him. I feel everyone who has, is, or will experience grief—and this, of course, is all of us—should let Hollars guide us through it."
--Pam Anderson, True Magazine

"Written like a journal, the book is intimate and raw, exposing the moments when the busyness and fullness of life with small children does not allow for or align with the weight of grief that comes with death...This really is a stunning book. I can't stop thinking about it."
--Margaret Leonard, Dotters Books

"The latest book by prolific Eau Claire author B.J. Hollars is undoubtedly his most personal. It may also be his most universal."
--Tom Giffey, Volume One

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