{"product_id":"9781429954693","title":"The Afterlife: A Memoir","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrom \"a  fiercely intelligent writer\" (\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e), a wry, poignant story of the difficult love between a mother and a son\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the winter of 2000, shortly after his mother's death from cancer and malnourishment, Donald Antrim, author of the absurdist, visionary masterworks \u003ci\u003eElect Mr. Robinson for a Better World\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Hundred Brothers, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Verificationist\u003c\/i\u003e, began writing about his family. In pieces that appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker \u003c\/i\u003eand were anthologized in \u003ci\u003eBest American Essays\u003c\/i\u003e, Antrim explored\u003cbr\u003ehis intense and complicated relationships with his mother, Louanne, an artist and teacher who was, at her worst, a ferociously destabilized and 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 Louanne twice. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Afterlife \u003c\/i\u003eis not a temporally linear coming-of-age memoir; instead, Antrim follows a logic of unconscious life, of dreams and memories, of fantasies and psychoses, the way in which the world of the alcoholic becomes a sleepless, atemporal world. In it, he comes to terms with—and fails to comes to terms with—the nature of addiction and the broken states of loneliness, shame, and loss that remain beyond his power to fully repair. This is a tender and even blackly hilarious portrait of a family—faulty, cracked, enraging. It is also the story of the way the author works, in part through writing this book, to become a man more fully alive to himself and to others, a man capable of a life in which he may never learn, or ever hope to know, the nature of his origins.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Farrar, Straus and Giroux","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47164733358320,"sku":"9781429954693","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781429954693_p0.jpg?v=1769902704","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781429954693","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}