Overview

From New York Times-bestselling, three-time National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin, a consideration of what makes for a life well lived—for readers of Oliver Sacks’s Gratitude and Deborah Levy’s Cost of Living. I can't see a way out of this. Things will not necessarily get better. This is my life, but I may not get to do what I want in it. Ingmar Bergman once said that an artist should always have one work between himself and death. When renowned author Gail Godwin tripped and broke her neck while watering the dogwood tree in her garden at age eighty-five, a lifetime of writing and publishing behind her and a half-finished novel in tow, Bergman’s idea quickly unfurled in front of her, forcing her to confront a creative life interrupted. In Getting to Know Death, Godwin shares what spoke to her while in a desperate place. Remembering those she has loved and survived, including a brother and father lost to suicide, and finding meaning in the encounters she has with other patients as she heals, she takes stock of a life toward the end of its long graceful arc, finding her path through the words she has written and the people she has loved. At once beautiful, biting, precise, poetic, and propulsive, Getting to Know Death is her own reckoning with the meaning of a life, the forms of passion that guide it, and how the stories we hold can shape our memories and preserve our selves as we write our own endings

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9781639734443

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Reviews

"""As always, wry, beady-eyed, acute."" - Margaret Atwood on OLD LOVEGOOD GIRLS ""An extraordinary novel about the nature of those rare friendships that fade for long periods of time to only rekindle in an instant when the conditions are right again."" - Ron Charles, The Washington Post, on OLD LOVEGOOD GIRLS ""Powerful, moving, and perfectly crafted... virtuoso dialogue and masterful handling of the passage of time."" - John Irving on OLD LOVEGOOD GIRLS ""Shimmeringly alive... gorgeous, heartbreakingly true, and profound... To say it's a masterpiece is an understatement."" - Caroline Leavitt on OLD LOVEGOOD GIRLS"

Author Information

Gail Godwin is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including the novels Grief Cottage, Flora, Father Melancholy’s Daughter, and Evensong, and Publishing, a memoir. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Woodstock, New York. www.gailgodwin.com

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