Blown Away

Blown Away is the most aptly titled book I've ever read. No one can read this account of a son's death and the father's aftermath without experiencing it as a life-altering event. Not since Augustine's Confessions has a memoir been at the same time a pathbreaking work of philosophy. Boothby takes us from the confrontation with incalculable loss to a meditation on the centrality of absence for living a genuine life. He has converted his despair into a transformative work for everyone who picks it up. -Todd McGowan, author of Universality and Identity Politics Blown Away is a remarkable account of grief and recovery-searing, heartfelt, profoundly honest, and dare I say, interesting. The best writing is always, at the core, exploration. This is an epic excavation. What's most satisfying here is the hyper-focus of the lens, the recalibration that cumulatively allows us to come to a new understanding of the experiential world of evolving self-awareness, loss, and finally love. -Karen Fish, author of No Chronology It is not easy to write exactingly about the suicide of a loved one, nor the personal revelations that unfold in a rigorous psychoanalysis. Richard Boothby has miraculously managed both, showing us how the tears in the fabric of our being need not be covered over with sentimental fantasies in order to live again, but can become the ground for a new way of knowing what can never be known in any life. I was, to make the difficult pun, blown away by this book. -Jamieson Webster, author of Conversion Disorder and coauthor of Stay, Illusion! This book is the moving story of a father describing his feelings and his numbness after Oliver, his son from his first marriage, dies by suicide. His new wife has the empathy and the generosity to let Richard visit Elaine, the mother of his dead son. Richard and Elaine reconnect in their joint grief over Oliver's death. The book is well written and makes one feel as if one is reading a Dostoevsky tragedy. -Wilfried Ver Eecke, author of Breaking through Schizophrenia: Lacan and Hegel for Talk Therapy Praise for Freud as Philosopher: It is in books like this that we should look for the renaissance of American thought! If the term 'classic' has any meaning today, Freud as Philosopher is it! -Slavoj Zizek Many have tried to uncover the philosophical underpinnings of Freudian psychoanalysis, but none has succeeded so convincingly as does Richard Boothby...This remarkably insightful thesis is brilliantly and lucidly argued in a book that will make a permanent difference in all future readings of Freud and Lacan. -Edward Casey, State University of New York at Stony Brook