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A children's book editor and writer fully immerses in the world of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls.
*****
If you have ever wished that a fictional character could step into real life, this is a book for you! The Wilder Life is the story of a children's book editor's singular effort to reconnect with the young Laura Ingalls she knew from the Little House on the Prairie book series, and the poignant lessons she had learned by the end of her journey.
Like many other women who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, McClure remembers being utterly devoted to the Little House books when she was young. Although she all but forgot about Laura as she grew older, the rediscovery of her old books many years later stirs a new sense of longing. Soon she is trolling the Internet for Laura websites, and she embarks on a road trip to Little House–related locations across the Midwest.
McClure's desire to reclaim her lost "Laura World" makes for captivating reading, as she explores museums and exhibits established in Ingalls’s honor, as well as events and places that celebrate life as it was lived more than a century ago. She comes across Little House pageants and Laura-lookalike contests, and even ends up having a strange overnight experience with a group of "End Timers" — people who are convinced the world’s end is imminent — at an Illinois farm.
What exactly does she hope to accomplish? Though McClure starts out searching for Laura, she ends up finding something far more transformative and profound.
Becky Krystal
…a moving memoir of losing a parent and the ensuing tailspin into grief…O'Rourke…capitalizes on her background as a poet, sprinkling her prose with imagery and metaphor to capture sensations ranging from the perfection of a summer evening in Vermont to the embrace of her mother under the flowering branches of a weeping cherry tree.
—The Washington Post
Gail Caldwell
…anguished, beautifully written…The Long Goodbye is an elegiac depiction of a drama as old as life, wherein the mother's first job is to raise a daughter strong enough to outlast her.
—The New York Times Book Review
Dwight Garner
The Long Goodbye is a poet's book, for sure. It's a sustained howl of pain, an unmediated wallow…Ms. O'Rourke grieves as if no one had grieved before her, and in part this illustrates her book's point. Nothing prepares you—not literature, not anything—for your own scalding emotions. She's aware of how she comes off…But there's bravery in her naked declarations. This is a poet's book too, in the urgent clarity of its observations.
—The New York Times
From the Publisher
"Meghan O'Rourke, a celebrated poet and critic, writes prose as if she was born to it first. Her memoir The Long Goodbye is emotionally acute, strikingly empathetic, thorough and unstinting intellectually, and of course elegantly wrought. But it's above all a useful book, for life-the good bits and the sad ones, too."
Richard Ford
"Meghan O'Rourke has written a beautiful memoir about her loss of a truly irreplaceable mother-yes, it is sad, it is in fact heartrending, but it is many things more: courageous, inspiring, wonderfully intelligent and informed, and an intimate portrait of an American family as well."
Joyce Carol Oates
"Meghan O'Rourke is an extraordinary writer, and she offers precious gifts to readers in this powerful memoir. There is the gift of entering her family, with its vibrant characters and culture. There is the gift of her profound insights into the experience of grief, its grip and the diverse ways we struggle to reenter a world where joy is felt. But most of all, there is her gift of showing us how love prevails after even the most devastating loss."
Jerome Groopman, M.D., Recanati Professor, Harvard Medical School, and author of The Anatomy of Hope and How Doctors Think
Library Journal
Stunned by the strength of her reaction when her mother died at age 55, award-winning poet and Slate culture critic O'Rourke began keeping a record of her slow passage through grief, which she eventually shared with Slate readers. Her nine-part series got huge response and even sparked comparisons to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. That's a good recommendation.
