Perdita (Hardcover)

Dylan Riley

ISBN 10: 1804296082 / ISBN 13: 9781804296080

Published by Verso Books, London, 2024

About this Item

Hardcover. Our marriage was, from any conventional point of view, wildly implausible; and you, my dear son, are the miraculous product of this beautiful, rather crazy, and all too brief love affair." When Dylan Riley received the devastating news that his wife, Emanuela, had cancer, he began writing blog posts describing the anguish and disarray brought by her worsening symptoms. Perdita is written for their teenage son, Eamon. It is a lyrical memoir of a marriage, from their heady first encounters in Rome. It is also a raw and moving account of a bereavement. Cancer, Riley reflects, is a pitiless opponent. It drains hope of its power and turns it into self-delusion. Living with cancer is to experience a progressive foreshortening of time. Next year might be terrible, but there can be a few good months now; tomorrow will likely be bad, but let's focus on today. Riley finds that hope itself, that tricky and dangerous emotion, grows out of the soil of our mortality, and of the mortality of those we love.Perdita offers no advice. It tries more simply to represent a lost connection. "I wanted the world to know what it had it had lost," he explains, "and maybe in knowing it to make her live again. An intense literary memoir of love and grief Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781804296080

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Perdita (Hardcover)
• Publisher: Verso Books, London
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1804296082
• ISBN 13: 9781804296080
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

An intense literary memoir of love and grief

“Our marriage was, from any conventional point of view, wildly implausible; and you, my dear son, are the miraculous product of this beautiful, rather crazy, and all too brief love affair.” When Dylan Riley received the devastating news that his wife, Emanuela, had cancer, he turned to writing to express the anguish and disarray brought by her worsening symptoms and then her passing. Perdita, composed for their teenage son, Eamon, is the result of this attempt to represent loss. It is at once a portrait of youth, a lyrical memoir of a marriage, and a raw and moving account of bereavement.

Riley describes cancer, Perdita’s central antagonist, as a pitiless opponent, draining hope of its power and reducing it to self-delusion. Its course forces a progressive foreshortening of time. Next year might be terrible, but there can be a few good months now; tomorrow will likely be bad, but let’s focus on today.

In this memoir, the disease provokes a broader set of reflections on the openness, contingency, and pain of the human condition, a status defined by the context of mortality, both our own and that of those we love.

About the Author

Dylan Riley was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1971 and teaches sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His other books are Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present and The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe.