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.
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
Title: The long goodbye
Subtitle: a memoir
Contributors:
By (author)
Meghan O'Rourke
ISBN 13: 9781844086771
ISBN 10: 1844086771
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Imprint: Virago Press Ltd
Publication Date: 29/05/2012
Place of Publication:
London,
United Kingdom
Edition:
BIC Subjects:
Biography & autobiography
;
Coping with death & bereavement
NBS Classification: Coping with Problems & Illness
Dewey Classification:
811.6
(DC23)
;
155.937
(DC22)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
Height: 198mm
Width: 126mm
Thickness: 22mm
Weight: 254g