Recommended Reading: The Long Goodbye

Traditional memoirs about losing a loved one start out with a diagnosis, follow the trajectory of caregiving and end with a heartbreaking death. In The Long Goodbye: A Memoir, Meghan O’Rourke gently rearranges the typical memoir format, and instead of telling the story of loss, she tells the more complicated story of grief.

With raw elegance, O’Rourke manages to put into words the grief she felt as she prepared to lose her mother and then what follows once she is gone. She describes the feeling that she needed somewhere to put all of her grief. "I was imagining a vessel for it: a long, shallow, wooden bowl, irregularly shaped." O’Rourke’s prose alone would make the memoir unique and worthy of attention, but what really sets The Long Goodbye apart is the way she highlights the happy and beautiful moments she and her family had together during the time her mother was ill. Even while her mother is laying in the hospital, O’Rourke says, “I could hear love, love that sounded like a rope, and I began to see a flickering electric current everywhere I looked as I went up and down the halls, flagging nurses, little flecks of light dotting the air in sinewy lines, and I leaned on these lines like guy ropes when I was so tired I couldn't walk anymore..."

O’Rourke continues the story of her loss for two years after her mother's death. Grief and healing and grief again fill the pages with a weaving narrative, beautiful metaphors dotted along every page. As she tries to figure out what to say to people about what she is going through and what to tell herself, O'Rourke delves into American rituals for mourning, calling on the words of other writers to help her (and us) understand the complex shape of grief. Whether you are grappling with personal loss or not, The Long Goodbye is one of the most beautiful and accurate portraits of grief on the shelves today.  

The Long Goodbye: A Memoir
by Meghan O'Rourke
320 pp. Riverhead