The Long Goodbye

A Memoir

Meghan O'Rourke

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Paperback

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English

Little Brown
01 June 2012

Biography; Memoirs; Coping with death & bereavement

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.

By: Meghan O'Rourke
Imprint: Little Brown
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 128mm, Spine: 21mm
Weight: 260g
ISBN: 9781844086771
ISBN 10: 1844086771
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 01 June 2012
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Meghan O'Rourke was born in 1976 and lives in New York with her husband. She is a frequent contributor to Slate, a founding editor of Double X, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. She has published one volume of poetry.

Reviews for The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

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