Chapter 3 “A Secular Mind Searching for Its Lost Love”
Mourning, Religion, and the Return of the Dead in Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye
In: Religious Narratives in Contemporary CultureSearch for other papers by Mihaela Precup in
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Abstract
This chapter provides a reading of American writer Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye (2011), a memoir of mourning that focuses on the author’s loss of her mother following a battle with cancer. The narrator’s suffering is increased by the fact that she is an atheist who does not feel she belongs to a specific religious community where ritual might provide some solace. As such, she employs research, writing, and performance as stand-ins for organized religious ritual. In this chapter, I examine O’Rourke’s attempt to fashion and perform personal mourning rituals in the absence of a religious community by using a selection of her own bibliography of death studies scholars and memoirists.