The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

This is possibly the most honest review I'll ever write. I read O'Rouke’s book as part of the TLC Book Tour and if I hadn’t had an actual deadline to read and review the book by, I’m not sure I would have made it all the way through it.

It was incredibly hard for me to finish this book, but that’s not because it wasn’t excellent, it’s because it hit too close to home. I saw too much of myself in the circumstances of Meghan's mother's death. My own mom was diagnosed with cancer, then after months of chemo she was declared in remission. A few months after that she relapsed and the cancer killed her after a two-year battle. She was exactly ten years younger than Meghan's mom. I read The Long Goodbye sobbing through many of its show more pages. As most people who know me well could attest, I don’t cry easily or often. When my own mom died, most of my weeping was done in the middle of the night when no one was around, so when I say I couldn't stop crying while reading this, that's no small thing.

O'Rouke's memoir is so painfully honest. She writes of arguments with her mom, trying to escape the situation and pretend like it wasn't happening, fights with her siblings or Dad, she doesn't hold back on the all-encompassing pain that death causes. It's amazing how far away you can feel from you own family when experiencing a loss like this. Even though you are all losing the same person, you experience that loss in such different ways that it's hard to connect with them.

Then there are the dreams. After losing your mother, this person who has literally brought you into the world, you can't stop dreaming about them. Those dreams, so real that you wake and have to remember their death all over again, haven't stopped for me after 13 years. I still see her, so close to me, and then wake to have to process the loss all over again.

Of course Meghan wasn't perfect while dealing with doctors and people in her own life, but none of us are. We see death closing in and we panic. We decide we can fight it if we just know enough about the disease. Then when that doesn't work we pray, then we argue, then we hope, then, finally, we understand that we can't control it and we grieve.

O’Rouke’s memoir is intensely personal and looks at her own relationships and reactions to the death, but it also deals with broader issues. She discusses American’s lack of traditions and rituals in grieving. We don’t wear black for months anymore or wail with anguish or tear our clothes. Grieving has become the final taboo. You’re supposed to act like everything is ok, when you feel the opposite. No one wants to hear about your grief, especially if it has been a couple months.

I can’t explain quite how much her memoir meant to me. It was like reading my own grief. She put words to so many of my feelings and I completely agree with both her and Iris Murdoch, who once said, “The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.” To me, this book was one bereaved woman speaking to another.

“When we are learning the world, we know things we cannot say how we know. When we are relearning the world in the aftermath of loss, we feel things we had almost forgotten, old things, beneath the seat of reason.” show less

O'Rourke here limns the few months before her mother's death and the year or so following it in searing, heartbroken prose. This is a grief acutely, almost claustrophobically, observed. There were a few times I grew impatient with her inability to process her grief but then I remembered trying, just the other day, to tell someone about my uncle, dead lo these 20-odd years, and being ambushed by a fresh wave of mourning.

The prose is crystalline and jagged and sometimes transcendent. It's a sad and beautiful book that's at times almost too intimate. Well worth reading, but not one I think I will ever read again.

I almost didn't finish this book. Multiple times. I had at least one anxiety attack in the middle of it. It's taken me almost two weeks to get to the end. It's one of the most painful books I've ever read, unvarnished sorrow, alarming in how realistic it seemed. I picked it up after my dog died but as I was coming out of my grief, I fell into Meghan O'Rourke's -- a ravaging, fierce grief that, while very specific, also spoke to the universality of the awful experience of losing someone close.

I found the first half of the book almost unreadable. Not because of the writing, which was exquisite and delicate and vociferously sincere, but because the experience of watching your mother die slowly felt so excruciating. At one point, toward show more the end of her mother's life, faced with the inevitability of my own looming demise, I had to put the book down for a few days and think about what I'm doing with my life. The second half, too, was harrowing -- the author felt her mother's absence so sharply, and there was no way for her to overcome the pain.

I loved how, after her mother's death, O'Rourke starts recovering and seeing the world in a new light. To me, it seemed like she saw everything in a new color, everything weighted down by its mortality but also freed of another kind of weight. The beautiful excerpts of other people's experiences of grief were powerful, too. I should re-read this book one day in a slower, more careful manner to fully comprehend O'Rourke's pain. show less

This is not an emotionally easy book to read, but I think it is quite well written and it feels very honest. There are interesting insights into mother-daughter/child relationships, grief and mourning, the experience of death in our culture, etc. I won't say I "enjoyed" it, but it was well worth reading.

The Long Goodbye is one of the best books I have read this year. It was moving and at times brought me to tears.

After reading Meghan O'Rourke's book of poetry, Sun in Days, I wanted to find out more about the author and wound up on her Wikipedia page and eventually on the author's own page. I don't actively seek out books about grief and mourning...my mother died in 2013 and the moving on part for me came about 9 months down the road but I still look back at the guilt and sadness I had at the time and have wanted to try to understand it better.

Meghan O'Rourke's relationship with her mother was far different from my relationship with mine. I can't help but wonder that one's grief is shaped by the prior relationship with the deceased. I show more know that to a large degree, I saw my mother as a figure I was unable to say no to and who manipulated my life even into my adult years. There is too much backstory to be able to explain in depth all that I felt toward my mother in her declining years of diabetes and eventual move into an assisted living facility but suffice to say, our relationship was strained. She was prone to circular arguments, had the possible beginnings of dementia and, my sisters and I believe, had undiagnosed narcissism that made her a challenge to enjoy being around.

O'Rourke's writing has a narrative voice that is immediately appealing to me despite the subject matter. I wanted to read the book in the evening when I came home even though, at times, it left me thinking about my own mourning experience and feeling rather down.

Can it be that what O'Rourke went through was a more "normal" or healthier experience than what I went through? I just remember feeling profoundly guilty about my mother's last few years and my relationship with her whereas O'Rourke's loss is more deeply felt and reflects a more profound connection between two people.

I really want to go back now and read many of the poems in O'Rourke's Sun in Days because I realize now that many of them were about her grief or tidbits from her young life with her parents. I also will actively seek to own Meghan O'Rourke's books rather than just getting them from the library. show less

First of all, you should know that Meghan O'Rourke writes like an angel.

I am a fan of the memoir, and of course I have read those two iconic journals of loss and grief, C. S. Lewis's "A Grief Observed" and Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking." Meghan O'Rourke's memoir of her mother's death is equally powerful, yet it is neither Lewis's raw howl of grief nor Didion's tearless restraint. Rather, it is a skilled surgeon's exploratory surgery on her own wounded heart. O"Rourke's eyes may be filled with tears, but her vision is crystal clear, and her craftsman's hand never wavers. This is a brilliant book.

The Long Goodbye is written in roughly chronological order - her mother's illness, her death, Meghan's long sorrow - but O'Rourke show more weaves dream-like memories and nightmarish dreams into the narrative with great skill, each memory/dream evoking an emotion so enormously, powerfully present that I swear I spent half of the book shaking tears from my eyes so that I could continue reading. She has a painterly way, too, of juxtaposing bright moments with dark ones in ways that heighten both the light and the darkness. I was impressed with the sheer honesty of the memoir: O'Rourke is unsparing of her own sometimes irrational behavior, recounting without shame or excuses her own ravenous efforts to continue to milk parenting from her parents, even as her mother was dying, even as her father was consumed by his own grief. If Meghan O'Rourke suffered from our culture's inability to confront grief and raw emotion, she herself has made an enormous contribution to that culture by writing this aching, naked memoir.

I suppose I should not be quoting from an ARC, but I'm afraid the temptation to offer samples of O'Rourke's lucent prose is irresistible. Here she is, speaking of a mother's symbolic significance to a daughter: "A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable." Or this, of the year following her mother's death: " If children learn through exposure to new experiences, mourners un-learn through exposure to absence in new contexts. Grief requires reacquainting yourself with the world again and again; each "first" causes a break that must be reset....And so you always feel suspense, a queer dread - you never know what occasion will break the loss freshly open. Whole days were intensely inflected by reliving the past, re-contextualizing it, so that when those memories resurfaced a second time, they were coated with a veneer that distances them. I knew, already, that the next time I smelled the ocean, I would not be gutted like this."

Thank to LT's Early Reviewer's Program for my copy of this book! show less

The Long Goodbye is poet and essayist Meghan O'Rourke’s insightful, honest and sometimes humorous account of her family's grief before and after her mother's death after a nearly three year battle with cancer. In a recent interview, O’Rourke, describing her father’s comments upon reading the book, said he’d found it hard to read, but felt it really captured her mother. Indeed, O’Rourke provides us a sense of her mother's humor, love of teaching children and clear-headedness.

However, the book is less a memoir of this funny and fun-loving, strong and nurturing woman. Instead, O’Rourke focuses more on the effect her mother’s death had on her and her family. I was drawn to her sense of loss of not only her mother, but of the show more person she got to be in relation to her mother. To her feelings of betrayal by society’s woefully inadequate rituals of mourning. Sadly, she has no real spiritual faith to tether her, but she draws sustenance and support from literature and poetry. I now read Hamlet with new eyes.

O'Rourke describes the "club" of understanding between those who have lost a parent. Having lost my father at an early age, I, too, am a member of this club. As such, 'The Long Goodbye' had particular resonance for me. It would be a mistake to pass on this book, however, if you are not a member of the club. Mourning and grieving is universal. O’Rourke’s lyrical writing captures much that will ring true to many readers. show less