The Long Goodbye
A Memoir
Published on 25. August 2011
Book
Hardback
320 pages
978-1-84408-675-7 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
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 TimesMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Little, Brown Book Group
Dimensions
Height: 221 mm
Width: 141 mm
Thickness: 29 mm
Weight
460 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84408-675-7 (9781844086757)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
New editions
Book
04/2012
Virago Press Ltd
€16.50
Shipment within 3-4 weeks
Additional editions
Person
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.