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 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!