MEGHAN O'ROURKE reads and signs her memoir "THE LONG GOODBYE"

Start: 04/25/2011 7:30 pm

The Long Goodbye (Riverhead)

Meghan O'Rourke, the Slate writer and award-winning poet, will discuss and sign her moving, beautiful memoir about her grief following her mother's death.

What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, Meghan O’Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to convey the paradox of grief—its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies—an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond.

With lyricism and unswerving candor, The Long Goodbye captures the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss. Effortlessly blending research and reflection, the personal and the universal, it is not only an exceptional memoir, but a necessary one.

"Meghan O'Rourke, a celebrated poet and critic, writes prose as if she was born to it first. Her memoir "The Long Goodbye" is 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 began her career as one of the youngest editors in the history of The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as Culture Editor and Literary Critic for Slate as well as Poetry Editor and Advisory Editor for The Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Redbook, Vogue, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry. O’Rourke is also the author of the acclaimed book of poems Halflife, which was a finalist for both the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. She was awarded the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism. One of three judges chosen to select Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007, she has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and a finalist for the Rome Prize of the Academy of Arts and Letters. She has appeared on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” and on NPR. A graduate of Yale University, she teaches at Princeton and New York University and lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up.

Photograph of the author by Sarah Shatz.

The Long Goodbye: A memoir (Hardcover)

By Meghan O'Rourke

$25.95

ISBN-13: 9781594487989
Availability: In the Warehouse (Usually ships to store or customer in 2-7 days. Call for time-sensitive orders)
Published: Riverhead Hardcover, 4/2011

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