Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, by Sean Murphy

Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone: A Memoir for My Mother by Sean Murphy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Many of us have lost loved ones and know the sorrow of missing that loved one. Sean Murphy's Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone chronicles the loss of his mother to cancer shortly after her fifty-ninth birthday.

While many memoirs tend to follow a straight-forward path for the period of time that the book follows, Please Talk... reads more as journal entries and conversations, with a poem or two. At first, I found the fluidness of the book - the back and forth across time - a little disconcerting. But Murphy's writing, his descriptions kept my attention long enough that the ebb and flow caught me. While the journal-and-background way of writing is definitely a different approach from the straight-forward path, it definitely worked with Please Talk....

Sean Murphy's love for his mom, as well as a mother's love for her family, come through wonderfully clear in Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, leaving the reader with only two or three regrets: that Linda Murphy died, that cancer still strikes, and that we all lose people who are very important to us. Sean Murphy has written a beautiful memoir that will stick with the reader.

Note: I won a copy of Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone by Sean Murphy from Goodread's giveaway.

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