The Rooms of Heaven: A Story of Love, Death, Grief, and the Afterlife - Hardcover

Allen, Mary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679454608 ISBN 13: 9780679454601

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

A memoir that is intimate and gripping, literary and suspenseful, The Rooms of Heaven is a love story, an anatomy of a suicide, an account of grief and healing, and a wholly original exploration of life after death.

At its center is Mary Allen, seeking a new beginning in Iowa City. There she meets Jim Beaman--smart, handsome, charming--a workingman who defies the stereotypes: he has a lightning wit, he draws and sculpts, he makes chess sets out of clay.

"It's hard to explain," Allen writes, "what it's like when you're attracted to someone as suddenly and fiercely as I was to Beaman, what it is about him that makes you fall in love with him." But she does explain, and we see the beginnings of an intense love affair: "We talked about everything and nothing, his childhood and my childhood, people we'd slept with and people we hated, death and college and dreams."

There's more to this relationship, however, than a simple love story. Jim Beaman, it turns out, has a drug problem, and Allen gets drawn into the world of addiction, with its promises and denials, good intentions and inevitable disappointments. Then Jim kills himself.

"Stories about somebody dying usually end with the death," notes Allen, but this time "death is not the end of the story." Convinced that Jim must be somewhere, "that a person, that Jim Beaman, was more than a complex piece of machinery, reduced now to a pile of ashes in a cardboard box," she embarks on a riveting, sometimes funny, often terrifying investigation of the landscape of the afterlife--a journey that leads her to (perhaps) contact with Jim, to the brink of madness, and, ultimately, back to herself.

In prose of astonishing originality, The Rooms of Heaven captures the beauty of the American heartland, the transformative power of love, and the "terrible magic" of death.

About this title

Review:

Although this is billed as a memoir, a more accurate label might be spiritual autobiography. After Mary Allen's drug-addicted boyfriend, Jim, commits suicide, she enters the classic dark night of the soul, confronting the denials as well as the truths that existed prior to her beloved's suicide. A less courageous author might have stopped there, but Allen has the guts also to reveal her mental anguish and psychiatric institutionalization. She delved into the underworld of the afterlife, desperate for connection with her boyfriend's spirit.

Although Allen does not dismiss the possibility of "Summerland," a spiritualist term for the afterlife, she stays grounded in her personal experience with contacting Jim's spirit, instead of making sweeping assertions about the hereafter. The effect is engrossing and at times laugh-aloud funny. Overall, Allen's narrative rings with dignity--clearly the voice of an accomplished, award-winning writer as well as a woman who has risen from the ashes of a lover's suicide and codependency (a cliché she skillfully avoids lingering over) to become a person who can finally love with ferocity and self-respect intact. --Gail Hudson

From the Publisher:

"Allen's memoir The Rooms of Heaven is a book about grieving and life after death. It's extraordinary not only in it candor, but in the way it lures you in, forcing you to think about things that would strike you, in any other book, as pretty damn batty. [This book] will stay with you. As out-there as Allen seems, she never really did anything out of the ordinary: she fell in love, and she believed in heaven." --Jeff Giles, Newsweek

"Riveting...To say that this is a memoir about passion, grief, and acceptance is to oversimplify the complexity of its startlingly fresh observations and of the fierce precision with which it renders a wide spectrum of emotions, from the giddy exhilaration of new love to the first, unwelcome stirrings of disillusionment, to the numbing torpor of despair. What's most amazing is Allen's perfect pitch, the tone--intelligent, humorous, unsentimental--that she somehow manages to get just right, and that enables her to convice us that the mystery of love is indeed far greater and more profound than the mystery of death." -- Francine Prose, Elle

"Allen's first book is an alternately intense and funny memoir that will touch a chord for anyone who has experienced the pain of a loved one's addition and violent death...Engrossing but never self-indulgent or sensationalist...a compelling tale." -- Kirkus Reviews

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679454608
• ISBN 13: 9780679454601
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 319