The Long Goodbye: A memoir [Hardcover]

Meghan O'Rourke (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 14, 2011

From one of America's foremost young literary voices, a transcendent portrait of the unbearable anguish of grief and the enduring power of familial love.

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 capture 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.

O'Rourke's story is one of a life gone off the rails, of how watching her mother's illness-and separating from her husband-left her fundamentally altered. But it is also one of resilience, as she observes her family persevere even in the face of immeasurable loss.

With lyricism and unswerving candor, The Long Goodbye conveys 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this eloquent, somber memoir about the death of her mother and grieving aftermath, poet and journalist O'Rourke (Halflife) ponders the eternal human question: how do we live with the knowledge that we will one day die? O'Rourke's mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer on Christmas day 2008; the headmaster of a Westport, Conn., private school, she was only 55 years old, and left a stricken husband, two sons, and daughter O'Rourke, the eldest sibling. O'Rourke had shuttled back and forth from her life in Brooklyn and then job at Slate over the preceding year to care for her increasingly debilitated mother. The two were extremely close, and the shock of her mother's illness devastated the whole family (the author married her longtime boyfriend shortly after the Stage 4 diagnosis, then separated just as quickly). Over the last months, O'Rourke was bracing herself, "preparing" for her mother's death, by reading everything she could during the dizzying rounds of doctors' and hospital visits, until the family could take their mother home to die in a heavily medicated peace. Anxious by nature, secretive, often emotionally brittle, O'Rourke grew acutely sensitive to her mother's changing states over the last months, desperate for a sign of her mother's love to carry her through the months of bereavement. O'Rourke heals herself in this pensive, cerebral work, moving from intense anguish and nostalgia to finding solace in dreams, sex, and the comforting words of other authors. (Apr.)
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Review

"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 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 of an American family as well."
-Joyce Carol Oates

"Meghan O'Rourke is an extraordinary writer, and she offers precious gifts to readers in this powerful memoir. There is the gift of entering her family, with its vibrant characters and culture. There is the gift of her profound insights into the experience of grief, its grip and the diverse ways we struggle to reenter a world where joy is felt. But most of all, there is her gift of showing us how love prevails after even the most devastating loss."
-Jerome Groopman, M.D., Recanati Professor, Harvard Medical School, and author of The Anatomy of Hope and How Doctors Think

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; First Edition edition (April 14, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594487987
• ISBN-13: 978-1594487989
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 8.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #107,567 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Meghan O'Rourke is the author of The Long Goodbye and the poetry collections Halflife and Once, which, like The Long Goodbye, touches on grief and the strange currents of loss. A former editor at The New Yorker, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. 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. A graduate of Yale University, she has taught at Princeton, The New School, and New York University. She lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up, and Marfa, TX.

Here's a dialogue about grief she did with Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/weekinreview/27grief.html

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 54 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Last Taboo April 14, 2011

By Jill I. Shtulman TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

At a time when our culture is open to just about everything, there is one last taboo that still remains - grief upon losing a loved one. Or, as the author herself puts it, "If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

It is one of those exquisitely personal transactions that lead me to this courageous and empathetic memoir. As I lose my own aging mother, little by little, I have entered a pre-mourning period that is often challenging for myself to navigate and others to understand.

And so I gravitated towards this courageous memoir from a woman who has steered her way those grounds and provides a sort of blueprint of what it's like to feel unmoored. Meghan O'Rourke's mother Barbara died in her early fifties; as she lay dying of cancer, Meghan became "irrevocably aware that the Person Who Loved Me Most in the World was about to be dead."

Without the rituals of long ago to guide her, with a strong fear of death that encompassed her since childhood, she "just wanted to flee the pain that lay like a fog in the house; getting away would be like turning a blank page, to a new story, a different one." The loss is so huge that she "needed to contain it somehow, to put barriers around its chaos." But like a child who has become separated from mommy, she is in disbelief that "a person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back."

She knows logically that her mother is no longer with her and that it's up to her and her two brothers to carry her forward in the year. Yet she remains "clueless about the rules of shelter and solace in this new world of exile." As C.S. Lewis wrote at the beginning of A Grief Observed, "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."

What is astounding about this memoir - what elevates it above many other so-called "grief books" - is that Meghan O'Rourke is able to take the personal and lifts it into the universal. The pain that any grieving or soon-to-be-grieving person feels - "Am I really she who has woken up again without a mother?" - or a father, or a husband or wife can understand Meghan's emotions, her monumental agony. It's a sorority or fraternity that only those who have experienced it are given entry.

With both candor and lyricism and an unswerving eye to preserving her truth, the author explores the fifteen months following her mother's death. She quotes scientific research as effortlessly as she quotes poets and writers who have confronted the grieving process. And at the end, when she resorts to a primal whisper - "Come on, Mom, say another night, stay the night--Stay the night," she gives voice to all those who struggle with the implausibility of knowing that those they love cannot live forever. It's a masterful work.

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A stunning portrait of a daughter's love and grief for her mother April 15, 2011

By Yelda Basar Moers

Format:Hardcover

I was pulled into Meghan O'Rourke's The Long Goodbye, a memoir on the loss of her mother, because I myself had recently endured the loss of my own baby daughter. You cannot compare one loss to another, but the grief that ensues is universal and relatable. Frankly, I had a hard time reading any books on grief because it made my loss all the more real.

But the plunge into O'Rourke's memoir was effortless. Following her voice, intelligent and real, while hopeful and optimistic, I became enveloped not only in her story, but into her poetic world, where events, emotions and yearnings are transferred into stunning prose. Though O'Rourke is a poet, and her poetic voice gleams through every page, she is also down-to-earth and approachable. In fact, she speaks so intimately, and with such sincerity, that after reading her memoir, I felt I had met every single one of her family members and become a trusted friend.

Her story begins with the death of her mother to colorectal cancer and her immediate reaction to this shocking reality. She is processing the event, flashbacking to her mother's healthier days and when she learns of the cancer for the first time. The narrative then climaxes to the moment when her mother is admitted to the hospital, where it is discovered that her cancer has returned after a brief remission. O'Rourke's portrayal of her mother is pitch perfect and so tangible, that I could feel how her mother moved, almost predicting her expressions and reactions. Barbara O'Rourke was a gifted woman, the headmaster of a private school, a mother of three children, a devoted wife, caretaker, lover of pets, with a passion for books, which she passed on to her children.

Together with chronicling the illness of her mother in the first part of her memoir, the author also recounts her marriage and subsequent divorce. This double loss is palpable. In the second and third parts she shares her journey in processing it all, consulting books, turning to poems, anything to make sense of this loss, which she likens to an amputation--the days get better but you always feel the loss. So true. Also compelling is her discussion of present day society's handling of grief, how it has become a private, lonely, silent passage unlike the rituals of the past. O'Rourke is not religious, but she admits to an "intuition of God," an attraction to spirituality, and concedes near the end of her book that she did feel the interconnectedness of things, that there was something out there, as Tolstoy said in his own memoir.

I've read memoirs on a loss of a spouse, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and the loss of a child, Ann Hood's Comfort, but I had yet to read of a loss of a parent. As the author says, what can be a greater bond than a mother to a child, as one comes out of another? The person who loved me most in the world was about to be dead, she says. How to cope with such a loss? As logical and empirical as O'Rourke can be, she succumbs to the notion that perhaps the dead never really leave us. They are still around; they are with us more than ever before; we just have to adjust to this new reality.

There are times that the narrative meanders, and breaks off into little vignettes of memories of her mother, or unconnected instances of time, like watching an injured hawk writhe in pain on the street one moment, and almost miraculously fly up the next. Parts are slow to start, others humming beautifully along; I feel I am in and out of the story. Sometimes O'Rourke is angry and not particularly likeable, sometimes sympathetic and grateful. But almost uncannily, this pattern mimics grief, which is not always so clean-cut--yes, sometimes it's even messy. But it's the truth. What more can we expect from a writer?

"One day as the winter gave way to spring," O'Rourke writes, "I woke up, startled, to realize that I wanted to feel pleasure--that I missed reveling in the world."

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars moving, tender, transcendent May 1, 2011

By Jennifer Scott

Format:Hardcover

First off, my mother died a few months ago, and I was definitely looking for some sort of touchstone to figure out how to begin to parse through the feelings I had. I read Motherless Daughters, and it was helpful, but I felt that it wasn't quite what I needed. What I wanted was something that wouldn't explain things, but would just be there. And O'Rourke's memoir does that. It's deeply, viscerally personal, and I think that's what makes it work. Because in hearing O'Rourke's grief, I could begin to find the words and feelings I'd been too afraid to verbalize. O'Rourke underscores the point that grief is unique--and everyone experiences it differently.

Sure, that's an elementary point, but it's one many books about grief grapple with--how do you write about something that's different for everyone? By writing a no-holds barred memoir about the period surrounding her mother's death and dying, O'Rourke portrays the grief as she felt it--and, for me, gave me a sense that if she got through it, it may not be pretty or elegant or poetic, but I'll GET THROUGH IT too.

The writing was lovely and honest, and I've found it's been a great conversation starter with friends to discuss the depths of grief.