After Death A Personal Narrative

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"Anguished, beautifully written... The Long Goodbye is an elegiac depiction of drama as old as life." -- The New York Times Book Review 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.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ... LETTERS FROM JULIA FIEST SERIES, TO HER FRIEND* I. CROSSING THE BAR. When I left you, darling, you thought I was gone from you forever, or at least till you also passed over. But I was never so near to you as after I had, what you called, died. How You Feel After Death. I found myself free from my body. It was such a strange new feeling. I was standing close to the bedside on which my body was lying; I saw everything in the room just as before I closed my eyes. How She Felt In Dying. I did not feel any pain in "dying;" I felt only a great calm and peace. Then I awoke, and I was standing outside my old body in the room. There was no one there at first, just myself and my old body. At first I wondered I was so strangely well. Then I saw that I had passed over. I waited about a little; then the door opened and Mrs. H. came in. She was very sad; she addressed my poor body as if it was myself. I was standing looking at her, but all her thoughts were upon the poor old body I had left behind. It seemed so absurd I could not help laughing. I did not try to speak at first; I waited to see what would happen. An Angel and Her Mission. Then I felt as though a great warm flood of light had come into the room, and I saw an angel. She, * These "Letters" are partially made up from extracts from letters written with my hand, by Julia to her friend Ellen in 1892-3, together with others addressed to me. As these grew out of the correspondence with Ellen, I have included them in the first series. The black-letter headings are, of course, my own. for at first she seemed to be a female, came to me and said: "I am sent to teach you the laws of the new life." And as I looked, she gently touched me and said: "We must go." Then I left the room and my poor...

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras. This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.