Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | December 10, 2025
I have never read any of Sophie Kinsella’s popular Confessions of a Shopaholic novels, but I did read What Does It Feel Like?, a barely fictional account of her battle with brain cancer. That book stuck with me hard. It’s about a successful novelist who has everything - a successful career and a loving family - only to wake up in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there, and to be informed by her husband that she had undergone surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor.
And then she finds out that removing the tumor didn’t save her life; it only extended it a few years. She had glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer so aggressive that I was genuinely shocked she survived not only long enough to write the novel but to see it published. In fact, she lived for two more years after its publication.
She passed away today.
I didn’t know much about her beyond what I read in What Does It Feel Like?, but I cannot recommend that short novel (it’s about 150 pages) enough. She details her struggle with how and when to tell her kids about the brain tumor, but she really spends much of the novel reflecting on the things that really matter in life: holding her husband’s hand, taking walks, and game nights with her kids.
As anyone who has gone through a cancer journey or had a loved one who has, you know how heightened your senses can get, how the importance of small moments is magnified, and how much you appreciate the mundane details of life. And then, when it’s over - when the immediacy of death is thankfully lifted - you snap back into old patterns, grumble about having to wake up too early or check your phone while playing games with your family, or complain about the minutiae you forgot meant so much when it looked like you were going to lose it all.
And What Does It Feel Like? brought it all back for me. I should probably read the book once a year, if only to remind myself to appreciate those small joys we all take for granted. I’ll admit I had a brief moment of dizziness while walking one day, around the time I was reading it, and spent two weeks hiding from my wife what I was certain was brain cancer based on the symptoms Kinsella described in the book. But other than that, the book was exceptional!
Kinsella was 55. Far too young, but she brought so many people so much happiness with her novels, and I know many readers of What Does It Feel Like? felt a pang of real sadness hearing that the world has lost her. But we know, at least, that she truly appreciated those final years and took all the joy she could from the life that remained to her.
Our warmest thoughts to her family. May her memory be a blessing.
