The Last Good Funeral of the Year by Ed O'Loughlin
CBC Books | | Posted: December 15, 2021 12:23 AM | Last Updated: December 5, 2022
A memoir about reassessing your life in the wake of a death of an old friend
It was February 2020 when Ed O'Loughlin unexpectedly heard that Charlotte, a friend from the old days, had just died young and before her time. He realized that he was being led to reappraise his life, his family, and his career as a foreign correspondent and novelist in a new, colder light. This search for meaning becomes the driving theme of O'Loughlin's year of confinement. The result is a haunting examination of the author's early life and love, the journalists and photographers with whom he covered wars in Africa and the Middle East, the suicide of his brother, his new work as an author, a family home on the edge of a graveyard, and the mysteries of memory, aging, and loss. He was suddenly faced with facts that he had been ignoring, that he was getting old, that he wasn't what he used to be, that his imagination, always over-active, had at some point reversed its direction, switching production from dreams to regrets. (From House of Anansi Press)
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Ed O'Loughlin is a Toronto-born author and journalist. His other books include the novels Not Untrue and Not Unkind, This Eden, and Minds of Winter, which was a finalist for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize.