The Long Goodbye: A Memoir by Meghan O’Rourke

(Riverhead, $26)

Meghan O’Rourke should have been prepared for the death of her mother, said Matthew Shaer in Bookforum.com. By her own measure, the poet and former Slate​.com editor was given plenty of time to “prepare for the inevitable.” She was fortunate enough to have had a good relationship with her mother throughout her life. She was even able to say her goodbyes more than once during her mother’s final days. Still, when Barbara O’Rourke died of cancer in 2008, at age 55, grief struck her daughter with devastating force. As she explains in this “bracing and beautiful” new memoir, the experience made her realize the degree to which rituals of public mourning have disappeared, and how much we still need them.

She doesn’t follow that train of thought as far as she might, said Anne Diebel in The New York Observer. Though O’Rourke “moves deftly” between recording her particular experience of grief and illuminating a cultural obsession with “moving on,” she undercuts her point by insisting on the uniqueness of her experience. It’s true that she responded to her mother’s illness and death in surprising ways: She impulsively married a longtime boyfriend, left him just months later, quit a job, and had an affair. One night, she sliced her arm with a knife at the dinner table. But she doesn’t give us a way to understand how a culture that promoted public mourning might have helped her, and she also quotes enough great writers on grief that the culture doesn’t seem as silent on the topic as she suggests.

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O’Rourke’s own writing eventually allows her to create a vessel for her grief, said Alice Gregory in NPR.org. The Long Goodbye is itself “a mourning ritual”: It “summons sweet memories, forces unfair questions, and provokes difficult introspection.” Though “surely written as therapy, it’s a book that operates like a syllabus.” Drawing from the work of both researchers and other poets, it gives us a blueprint for how to overcome our collective unease with grief and with those suffering from it. “It shows not only how to heal but also how to help.”