Epilogue: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Having already lost his mother and only brother, twenty-four-year-old Will Boast finds himself absolutely alone when his father dies of alcoholism. Numbly settling the matters of his father's estate, Boast is deep inside his grief when he stumbles upon documents revealing a secret his father had intended to keep: Hed had another family before Will'sa wife and two sons in England.Winner, The Rome Prize Wise, charming and deeply moving. It is during these unspoken moments that the author deftly captures the fleeting intimacy between father and son&.The power of Boast, an accomplished fiction writer and essayist, has composed a moving, elegantly contrapuntal narrative about coming to terms with his familiesthe one he lost, and the one that welcomed him with open arms. A beautiful and finely crafted memoir, one that recalls in its very construction the vortexes and whorls of grief, the ways that memory is a living thing and time marches forward&It is a truly rare feat for a book to both break your heart and make you wish it wouldnt end: Epilogue does both. Boast has shown us life as it really is: beautiful, strange, cruel, surprising, and rarely so honestly explored. This remarkable memoir is written with extraordinary care, intelligence, and honesty. Though the material is powerful to begin with, what makes it work so well is its authorial voice: a rare combination of rawness and restraint, probing and delicacy, self-laceration and tenderness toward others. In short, it's fully alive. Don't let the title of Will Boasts magnificent memoir fool you A brave, brilliant, masterfully crafted story about an ordinary family's extraordinary collision of tragedies and secrets. Will Boast's efforts to write his familys epilogueto forge a space for his own life through understanding theirsmake for one of the most moving and transformative reading experiences I've had. I won't ever forget it. Riveting, soulful, and courageously told... Never has a story of loss been sl£h