The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke — Book Review + Discussion
I send this book to every friend or loved one who experiences a loss. A powerful grief memoir with gorgeous lines that feel remarkably human, accurate, and precise.
To see this book review in its full visual glory, read it on the book blog I’ve been running since 2011. (I know—how vintage!) Still, I’m glad you’re reading in any format.
Book: The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke
Release Date: August 3, 2012
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Format: Paperback
Source: Bought
Posted: November 19, 2019
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.
Update from 2025: It’s weirdly hard to find copies of this book, but it’s still the gift I send to everyone I know who has had a loved one pass away—even if I have to send them a used one. Especially after Meghan O’Rourke’s National Book Award finalist status in 2022 for The Invisible Kingdom, this book should be much more known and loved.
Reflecting on This Book in 2024
In looking through my review archive and previous posts from the old Words Like Silver website, I do wish I’d written a full review of this one instead of a post compiling various quotes I liked.
I’d have to reread The Long Goodbye to remember exactly what I first loved so much, but I can tell you wholly that whenever I have a friend or family member experience a loss, this is the book I send them. My go-to grief move is to ask for their address if it’s not intrusive and to send this book along for them.
I love to send a book (and it feels non-invasive) because they can visit it if they want, or let it rot on the shelf. They could read it now while everything’s fresh, or later when they feel like they have the capacity. No response necessary.
People will say that time heals, and that can be true. But I think this book can be meaningful for those who are still in the thick of it but feel like they can’t reach out to others because their darkness is repetitive or taboo or shameful at this point. (In fact, that’s the topic of one of my favorite moments from my book—which is one of the most emo things I’ve ever written for sure.)
I personally have derived a lot of help from its pages when devastated, and I know from those who have wanted to dive in that it’s been helpful. A friend who lost her dad to the same kind of cancer as the book covers reached out months later to say that she couldn’t touch it for a good long while but when she did, found it incredibly cathartic and meaningful. So it’s kind of a good hurt. I’ve given this book to at least fifteen friends and loved ones at this point after a death. I hate that I have to, but love that it’s helped some.
Like I said, I don’t remember much from my reading experience beyond feeling like Meghan O’Rourke so entirely summarized feelings I’d never, ever been able to put into words before. That’s why I read, in a nutshell. Maybe it means O’Rourke is simply that talented at articulation, or maybe she and I are very similar in our balance of romanticization vs. how we endure the impermanent.
Her precision was a marvel, whether talking about the sadness, impermanence, the role of memory in keeping someone alive, or the good, human moments unrelated to her mother’s death and identity. The writing style reminded me a lot of The Edge of Everyday: Sketches of Schizophrenia by Marin Sardy or How to Fall in Love with Anyone by Mandy Len Catron. (Perhaps M names are good for this.)1
I did read this book—which covers hospice, and cancer, and grief—before June 2022, when I helped my own grandmother through her hospice experience. The hospice experience is an awful, but oddly reverent, thing.2 My great-aunt and her daughters came down from Virginia to say goodbye, and had generational in-person knowledge they passed to my mom and I, who were the members of my immediate family there for her death. We talked about how one day, when someone else is in hospice, it will be my job likely to teach the others how to handle it. There’s something very honorable and reverent about the process of saying goodbye, and one of the greatest privileges of my life will be having given her eulogy at the funeral.
After, I gifted the book to my mom and my aunt. My mom walked into my room crying after finishing it that July. I’d likely have different thoughts upon reading it now: a new layer of experience to connect to upon rereading the book.
All in all: it’s an important book. An expressive one. One you can read situationally (while dealing with any sort of loss), gift to others, or simply read when you want an insightful, existential read with a lot of substantial food for thought.
My Original Review from 2019
Normally, I wait until I’m finished with a book to spotlight an individual read, but this one has been such a valuable part of the past week for me that I wanted to write about individual portions before having to collect my thoughts in a cohesive whole.
The Long Goodbye is a memoir written by a woman dealing with her mother’s death; as she notes, her grief isn’t an unusual experience. The experience of grief is universal, but expresses in such personal ways. The Long Goodbye also functions as a beautiful exploration of the balance between personal experience and the big picture.
The reason why this book has struck a particular cord with me, aside from just being a balm for a year with a lot of death in it, is that it’s so remarkably articulate. It reminds me of the Hemingway quote,
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.
It’s why I have a pure love for children’s books like The Day I Became a Bird and Cry, Heart, But Never Break and Open House for Butterflies. (Those may be deserving of another post, regardless.)
I first encountered The Long Goodbye in a Brain Pickings compilation — which is how I find many of my books. It was one of the rare books I bought directly after hearing about it, because I wanted to underline every line she offered in the post.
Lines I Loved
“The snow was truly flurrying now: it was eerie and witchy out and the sadness in my heart grew more and more swollen, but it was the swell of mystery: What strange beauty surrounds us, and how impermanent our vision of it, how palpable our loss when those we love can no longer view the world they would adore.”
“It got ‘better’ in the sense that I could go for days without thinking too much about the fact that someone I still loved as dearly as I ever did was dead. But to expect grief to heal is to imagine that it is possible to stop loving, to reconcile yourself to the fact that the lost one is somewhere else. So heal isn’t the right word.”
“[The passage] consoles me. The idea of time as a pool brings an actual solace, conjuring up the peculiar fact that our brains so often make the past as vivid as the present, without our choosing. Our memory is our weather, and we are re-created by it every day.”
“I felt, viscerally, the interweaving of industry and nature and people, the layers of people. It helped me slip out of the grip of obdurate individuality and into the grip of something larger: a sense that I was part of a system.”
“After all, there was no way the girl he had known, and always meant to apologize to, was simply gone. It had seemed there would be time for one last conversation, one last chance to talk about the bond that had once been between them.”
“No; it’s a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, in a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools. It is too central for that. It’s not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.”
“When I’d been in the airport, waiting for my plane, my friend Vanessa had called me. ‘You’ve been handling this with grace,’ She said, kindly. ‘You deserve to have some fun.’ Now I was stupid with anger at myself for thinking I was handling anything well. It just meant I was hiding everything.”
“One would think that living so proximately to the provisional would ruin life, and at times it did make it hard. But at other times I experienced the world with less fear and more clarity. It didn’t matter if I was in line for an extra two minutes. I could take in the sensations of color, sound, life. How strange that we should live on this planet and make cereal boxes, and shopping carts, and gum!”
“It simply does not make sense that so enormous a transition would lead to so similar an existence.”
“A psychiatrist reframed it for her: he said the people we love most do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.”
“The open sky over the land, the juxtaposition of the minute and the majestic — it all expressed the dissonance I felt, and having my sense of smallness reflected back at me put me strangely at ease. How could my loss matter in the midst of all this? Yet it did matter to me, and in the setting, that felt natural, the way the needle on the cactus in the huge desert is natural.”
“‘You know, you just have to do it. You don’t have a choice. And then once you’ve done it, you can do it again, and it isn’t so bad.’ She was a pragmatist at core: if you could be present, intensely present, the rest would work itself out. Later I realized that this was much harder than it looked.”
“In the face of the future erasure of a specific soul — the erasure of my mother’s soul — words about beauty and truth seemed necessary, almost ravishing. So did nature.”
“And in this perverse manner, I somehow I believed, and still do, sitting here with my books and my words, using my mind to scavenge every last scrap of meaning from the bones of these old ways…”
“One of the ideas I’ve clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out. If I work hard, I will be spared, and I will get what I desire, finding the cave opening over and over again, thieving life from the abyss…I also held the delusion that the imperfect could be fixed by attention.”
I think about this last passage a whole lot.3
For fans of:
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi; The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (which I actually really do not like, sorry); The Edge of Everyday: Sketches of Schizophrenia by Marin Sardy; How to Fall in Love with Anyone by Mandy Len Catron; Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar by Katie Yee; I Have Lost My Way by Gayle Forman.
Rogue rec of me, but anyone who connects with Peter Matthiessen’s depiction of grief in The Snow Leopard (i.e. anyone who thinks it’s actually a book about grief?) would probably like O’Rourke’s ways of reflecting.
Note: I just realized Meghan O'Rourke has a Substack! Don’t know why I hadn’t thought to look before.
Related Book Discussions:
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
The Solace of Open Spaces: Essays by Gretel Ehrlich
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2025 update: In reformatting this book review now, it also reminds me a lot stylistically of Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee, which has deservedly gotten a lot of buzz this year.
2025 update: I’m big into the science of awe, and Dacher Keltner’s research shows that encounters with life and death is one of those experiences that provokes it. Awe is (loosely) a sense of bigness and smallness in the face of the universe: the sense that all is significant, but that you’re comforted in the expanse of a greater system. Everything falls away when you’re grieving or dealing with that precipice, so the scientific backing makes sense.
Normally, I’d paste in an excerpt of the first page but—like I said: it’s actually very difficult to find this book online, which is a damned shame. It’s been such a good one for so many people I love and care about.