"Moonglow" by Michael Chabon was one of the books I got for Christmas from my mother before she was gone and Christmas stopped. It's about a man dying of cancer letting his grandson draw out his life story, so it's sat on my shelf for years, despite how easy and enjoyable I find Chabon's writing (easy in processing, not easy in content, necessarily).
"Moonglow" is weird, being a ... fictional memoir of a semi-fictional version of Chabon's grandfather? It's not clear how much is utter fiction and how much might be fictionalized truth and I don't think you need an answer to read and appreciate the novel. Maybe if you were doing some academic work on Chabon-the-writer's incorporation of non-novel elements in his novels.
Non-linear and occasionally wandering away from purpose, much as a conversation with a terminally ill person in their last days can be, focus wavering and endings to narrative chunks abrupt. Sometimes you're reading about the unnamed grandfather's service in WWII, sometimes about his initial meeting and connection with the narrator's grandmother and her young daughter. There's sections about the grandfather's time in prison and his life as a widower. There's a lot about rockets, the space program, dreams, betrayal. About the murky, traumatic past of the grandmother in occupied France and the grandmother's mental health issues, through the lens of the grandfather, and their impact on their marriage and child and the choices the grandfather makes.
This isn't Chabon taking another run at the WWII novel and it's not a Jewish refugee novel, although those elements are present. This is something else; a memoir of the impossibility of holding on to the American dream for swathes of Americans, the willingness of the place you belong being willing to sacrifice you, and how much home and belonging is owed to illusions and willing ignorance.
It's a little bit gothic.
I don't think it will be held in as high esteem as "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" in Chabon's canon. The intentional muddle of fiction and fact created by the frame narrative undercuts the novel's content, although not its themes. But it's compelling and sad and funny and dark and lyrical and easy, the characters broken and holding themselves together with duct tape, peppered with tangents into niche interests of Chabon's. I'm glad I finally cracked it open.
I don't think I could have read it sooner.