The best memoirs are not just an account of a single life, but a guide to how to live. This isn’t because the writer has found all the answers to our oldest human questions; it’s because the writer honors us by telling the hardest truths. Michael Loughran’s Windower is a memoir of grief, an account of the years before and after losing his wife to suicide, a document of love’s impossible forms. It is a report back—tender and uncompromising—from a place we could call hell, the place where we outlive those we love. In this endlessly vivid and true book, we follow the narrator in his ongoing daily life—amid friends and family, work, falling in love again—even as he is pursued by the Furies of guilt, regret, and vicious despair. Windower is a vital book about being human amid loss, about how to go on in this devastating and beautiful world. 

Praise for Windower:

“Windower is an essential addition to the grief canon. At once the memoir of an agonized man reeling from his wife’s suicide and of a man falling in love again; of the guilt and self-abasement a survivor accepts as penance for ordinary sins, and the thousand daily incursions of beauty which preempt his total self-destruction… In spite of its gravity, my predominant feeling reading this book was relief, relief that someone got it right, told the truth.” —Lisa Wells

“Windower is an impressively understated yet harrowing demonstration of the truth of Nicholson Baker’s definition of poetry as ‘a controlled refinement of sobbing.’” —David Shields

“Windower  is a raw, poetic, and deeply intimate exploration of the space where love and loss blur, each threatening to become the other. Through mythologies, daydreams, confessions, and ghosts, Loughran doesn't just document grief—he inhabits it. The result is a spare yet powerful meditation on what it means to be fully alive.” —Juliet Patterson

“Windower has the remarkable ability to imagine as literal what we so often fear to be inexpressible. The result is a book full of startling image, an intricately plotted mechanism that builds until the last page.” —Thomas Mira y Lopez

Bio:

Michael Loughran’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia.