“Windower is an essential addition to the grief canon. At once the memoir of an agonized man reeling from his wife’s suicide and of a man falling in love again; of the guilt and self-abasement a survivor accepts as penance for ordinary sins, and the thousand daily incursions of beauty which preempt his total self-destruction. In refusing to so much as name these expertly observed experiences ‘contradictions,’ Michael Loughran has given us something unique and humane. In spite of its gravity, my predominant feeling reading this book was relief, relief that someone got it right, told the truth.” —Lisa Wells
“Windower is an impressively understated yet harrowing demonstration of the truth of Nicholson Baker’s definition of poetry as ‘a controlled refinement of sobbing.’” —David Shields
“With unflinching honesty, Michael Loughran reckons with his wife’s suicide and the unexpected reality of falling in love again just six months later. Windower is a raw, poetic, and deeply intimate exploration of the space where love and loss blur, each threatening to become the other. Through mythologies, daydreams, confessions, and ghosts, Loughran doesn’t just document grief—he inhabits it. The result is a spare yet powerful meditation on what it means to be fully alive.” —Juliet Patterson
“‘Anything true is good to say,’ Michael Loughran writes early on in Windower. The Furies, hostile monks, grief, love, and shame in all their unlikely plumage: Loughran has the words for it, and he also has the words for what he doesn’t have the words for. By the end of this devastating book, I couldn’t help but feel really, really good. Windower has the remarkable ability to imagine as literal what we so often fear to be inexpressible. The result is a book full of startling image, an intricately plotted mechanism that builds until the last page.” —Thomas Mira y Lopez
The best memoirs are not just an account of a single life, but a guide to how to live. This isn’t because the writer has found all the answers to our oldest human questions; it’s because the writer honors us by telling the hardest truths. Michael Loughran’s Windower is a memoir of grief, an account of the years before and after losing his wife to suicide, a document of love’s impossible forms. It is a report back—tender and uncompromising—from a place we could call hell, the place where we outlive those we love. In this endlessly vivid and true book, we follow the narrator in his ongoing daily life—amid friends and family, work, falling in love again—even as he is pursued by the Furies of guilt, regret, and vicious despair. Windower is a vital book about being human amid loss, about how to go on in this devastating and beautiful world.
Michael Loughran’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia.
Contents
PS
Ohio
Metal
The Volcano
Sertig Path
Monster
Collins
Joan Didion
Boyer
The Eumenides
