Long Goodbye: A Year of Grieving - Hardcover

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.

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 Times