Long Goodbye: A Year of Grieving - Hardcover

Meghan O'Rourke

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1844086755 ISBN 13: 9781844086757

Publisher: Virago Press (UK), 2011

Synopsis

Meghan O'Rourke was thirty-two when her mother died of cancer on Christmas Day, 2008. As a writer, even in the depths of her grief, she was fascinated by what she observed of herself in the aftermath: the rage she felt, not only at what had happened to her mother, but also at the inability of people to acknowledge her pain; her sense that the meaning of her life had changed fundamentally with the loss of a parent; the way that the reassuringly familiar often became somehow completely new and strange. The Long Goodbye interleaves personal recollections of her much-loved mother with an examination of what it means to grieve in a society which no longer has the rituals - or even, most of the time, the desire - to engage with grief, to understand it, and to let it do both its worst - and its best.

About this title

About the Author

Meghan O'Rourke was born in 1976 and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Slate, and a founding editor of Double X. Her first book of poetry, Halflife, published in 2009 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Review

Emotionally acute, strikingly empathetic, thorough and unstinting intellectually, and of course elegantly wrought. But it's above all a useful book, for life -- the good bits and the sad ones, too. Richard Ford Meghan O'Rourke has written a beautiful memoir about her loss of a truly irreplaceable mother--yes, it is sad, it is in fact heartrending, but it is many things more: courageous, inspiring, wonderfully intelligent and informed, and an intimate portrait o Joyce Carol Oates In her blazingly honest, relentlessly brave memoir Meghan O'Rourke takes on the strange, impossible time after a parent's death. I couldn't recommend this elegant and fearless book more highly to anyone who has, or has had, a mother. Katie Roiphe, author of Uncommon Arrangements Anguished, beautifully written...Grief doesn't necessarily make you noble. Sometimes it just makes you crazy, or primitive with fear, and O'Rourke captures that emotional violence with elegant candor...The Long Goodbye is an elegiac depiction of a drama as o New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago Press (UK)
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1844086755
• ISBN 13: 9781844086757
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320