Education
O'Rourke is a graduate of Yale, and she received an MFA in Creative Writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
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book
Long Goodbye: A Memoir of Grief
(Meghan O'Rourke was thirty-two when her mother died of ca...)
Meghan O'Rourke was thirty-two when her mother died of cancer on Christmas Day, 2008. As a writer, even in the depths of her grief, she was fascinated by what she observed of herself in the aftermath: the rage she felt, not only at what had happened to her mother, but also at the inability of people to acknowledge her pain; her sense that the meaning of her life had changed fundamentally with the loss of a parent; the way that the reassuringly familiar often became somehow completely new and strange. The Long Goodbye interleaves personal recollections of her much-loved mother with an examination of what it means to grieve in a society which no longer has the rituals - or even, most of the time, the desire - to engage with grief, to understand it, and to let it do both its worst - and its best.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1844086771/?tag=2022091-20
(The Long Goodbye: A Memoir ) Author: Meghan O'Rourke Apr-2012
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010DTJZAS/?tag=2022091-20
The Long Goodbye: A Memoir
(What is it like to mourn today, in a culture that has lar...)
What is it like 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. 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. 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. Effortlessly blending research and reflection, the personal and the universal, it is a love letter from a daughter to a mother that will touch any reader who has felt the powerful ties of familial love.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594485666/?tag=2022091-20
Meghan O'Rourke
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Career
Journalism O'Rourke was formerly a fiction editor at The New Yorker and from 2005-2010 was poetry co-editor at The Paris Review. She is also an occasional contributor to The New York Times. O'Rourke has written on a wide and eclectic range of topics, including horse racing, gender bias in the literary world, the politics of marriage and divorce, and the place of grief and mourning in modern society.
She has published poems in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, The New Republic, and Poetry. Along with Perrine's Literatures Twelfth Edition. Her first book of poems, Halflife, was published by Norton in 2007.
O'Rourke's book, The Long Goodbye, a memoir of grief and mourning written after the death of her mother, was published to wide critical acclaim in April 2011. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. O'Rourke suffers from an autoimmune disorder which she has written about for The New Yorker.
She is working on a book about chronic illness. 2014 Guggenheim Award for General Nonfiction.
Achievements
Works
book
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The Long Goodbye: A Memoir
(What is it like to mourn today, in a culture that has lar...)
-
Long Goodbye: A Memoir of Grief
(Meghan O'Rourke was thirty-two when her mother died of ca...)
- (The Long Goodbye: A Memoir ) Author: Meghan O'Rourke Apr-2012
-
The Long Goodbye: A Memoir
