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A Story of Loss
by Jesse Mechanic
An emotional and heartbreaking memoir of the author's lifelong struggle with his mother's death from cancer.
Grief never goes away.
When he was a teenager, Jesse Mechanic's mother passed away after a long struggle with cancer. In this memoir, he looks back on that time, and on the ways that experience followed him throughout his life. Struggling with school while dealing with attentional problems and the overwhelming tsunami of grief, this book tells the story of Mechanic's slow work to figure out a life for himself. It's about obsessive-compulsive disorder, intrusive thoughts, and depression—straight-A's turning to straight F's, and smiles to blank stares. It's about what loss can teach us, and how trauma can be both debilitating and beautiful. It's about standing in dark rooms for long enough for your eyes to adjust.
And graffiti. It's about that too.
With powerful visuals and thoughtful, poignant text, this graphic memoir challenges readers to keep going in the face of the hardest times.
"[Mechanic's] reflections will ring painfully familiar to anyone who has stumbled around in the darkness of grief. This vulnerable graphic memoir cuts deep." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Mechanic's illustrations are vibrant and richly detailed, and his use of patterning is especially impressive. This is a raw account of grieving...a tender and frank memoir that will resonate with readers... A raw and eloquent graphic memoir about the shifting nature of grief." —Kirkus Reviews
"The most moving, exquisitely rendered text and art I have ever experienced about the death of a loved one. I needed it so much. And felt changed." —Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Grace Notes
"An inspiration to take the fear and emptiness of grief and to create new worlds which spread outward into the lives of everyone they touch." —Tim Bird, author of Adrift on a Painted Sea
"A beautiful, honest, and innovative ode to grief. A tribute to suffering, and a plea for compassion—for others, and for ourselves." —Hugh D'Andrade, author of The Murder Next Door
This information about The Last Time We Spoke was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jesse Mechanic is an opinion columnist, essayist, and artist. He has published work in Mother Jones, In These Times, HuffPost, Truthout, and other publications. Jesse enjoys woodworking, the television show Cheers, and working diligently to dismantle the various oppressive systems that define our world. The Last Time We Spoke is his debut graphic novel.
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