Sarah Manguso and Meghan O'Rourke
Wednesday 18 April, 2012
7pm, $0
192 Books
192 10th Avenue at 21st Street
The Guardians is an elegy for Manguso’s friend Harris, two years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and jumped under a train. The narrative contemplates with unrelenting clarity their crowded postcollege apartment, Manguso’s year on a writing fellowship in Rome, Harris’s death and the year that followed—the year of mourning and the year of Manguso’s marriage. As Harris is revealed both to the reader and to the narrator, the book becomes a monument to their intimacy and inability to express their love to each other properly, and to the reverberating effects of Harris’s presence in and absence from Manguso’s life. There is grief in the book but also humor, as Manguso marvels at the unexpected details that constitute a friendship. The Guardians explores the insufficiency of explanation and the necessity of the imagination in making sense of anything.
About The Long Goodbye: 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 convey the paradox of grief—its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies. With lyricism and unswerving candor, The Long Goodbye captures the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss. Blending research and reflection, the personal and the universal, this is not only an exceptional memoir, but a necessary one.
About The Long Goodbye: 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 convey the paradox of grief—its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies. With lyricism and unswerving candor, The Long Goodbye captures the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss. Blending research and reflection, the personal and the universal, this is not only an exceptional memoir, but a necessary one.