Epilogue – A Memoir - Softcover

Boast, Will

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1631490435 ISBN 13: 9781631490439

Publisher: Liveright, 2015

Synopsis

For Will Boast, what looked like the end turned out to be a new beginning. After losing his mother and only brother, twenty-four-year-old Boast finds himself absolutely alone when his father dies of alcoholism. Numbly settling the matters of his father's estate, Boast stumbles upon documents revealing a closely guarded secret his father had meant to keep: he'd had another family entirely, a wife and two sons. Setting out to find his half-brothers, Boast struggles to reconcile their family history with his own and to begin a chapter of his life he never imagined. "Riveting, soulful, and courageously told" (Maggie Shipstead), Epilogue is the stunning account of a young man's journey through grief in search of a new, unexpected love.

About this title

Review:

Excellent. . . . [A] finely wrought, wrenching yet lyrical study of a family that lives on past its seeming end.

Wise, charming and deeply moving.--Leslie Jamison

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.--Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head

Riveting, soulful, and courageously told, Will Boast's memoir is a gorgeous meditation on grief and family and also a deeply personal account of his coming of age under a relentless bombardment of tragedies and revelations. Never has a story of loss been so full of life.--Maggie Shipstead, author of the national bestseller Seating Arrangements

What if you lost your family, only to discover you had another? Will Boast's unforgettable memoir explores this seemingly impossible question in a straightforward yet lyrical language that infuses these pages with both wistfulness and hope.--Lysley Tenorio, author of Monstress

A brave, brilliant, masterfully crafted story about an ordinary family's extraordinary collision of tragedies and secrets. Will Boast's efforts to write his family's epilogue--to forge a space for his own life through understanding theirs--make for one of the most moving and transformative reading experiences I've had. I won't ever forget it.--Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints

[S]pellbinding... [Boast's] affecting journey, related without sentimentality or self-pity, is not so much about his need for family as it is a candid reflection on loneliness and personal identity.--Jonathan Fullmer

Boast, an accomplished fiction writer and essayist, has composed a moving, elegantly contrapuntal narrative about coming to terms with his families--the one he lost, and the one that welcomed him with open arms.--Ben Dickinson

Epilogue is a soulful and profoundly moving portrait of family and loss, of mystery and grief. The story unfolds and builds and doubles back on itself like the notes and riffs in a free jazz performance, and Will Boast is a virtuoso, a masterful writer and storyteller.--Chad Simpson, author of Tell Everyone I Said Hi

About the Author:

Will Boast was born in England and grew up in Ireland and Wisconsin. He won the Iowa Short Fiction Award for his story collection, Power Ballads, and the Rome Prize. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best New American Voices, and elsewhere. He divides his time between Chicago and Brooklyn, New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1631490435
• ISBN 13: 9781631490439
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288