The Afterlife: A Memoir

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

In the winter of 2000, shortly after his mother's death, Donald Antrim began writing about his family. In pieces that appeared in The New Yorker and were anthologized in Best American Essays, Antrim explored his intense and complicated relationships with his mother, Louanne, an artist, teacher, and ferociously destabilizing alcoholic; his gentle grandfather, who lived in the mountains of North Carolina and who always hoped to save his daughter from herself; and his father, who married his mother twice.

The Afterlife is an elliptical, sometimes tender, sometimes blackly hilarious portrait of a family--faulty, cracked, enraging--and of a man struggling to learn the nature of his origins.

Author: Donald Antrim
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 05/15/2007
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780312426354

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 07/15/2007 pg. 24

About the Author

Donald Antrim is the author of Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist, and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in New York City.