A "New York Times Book Review" Editors' Choice In the winter of 2000, shortly af
ter his mother's death, Donald Antrim began writing about his family. In pieces
that appeared in "The New Yorker" and were anthologized in "Best American Essays
, " Antrim explored his intense and complicated relationships with his mother, L
ouanne, an artist, teacher, and ferociously destabilizing alcoholic; his gentle
grandfather, who lived in the mountains of North Carolina and who always hoped t
o save his daughter from herself; and his father, who married his mother twice.
"The Afterlife" is an elliptical, sometimes tender, sometimes blackly hilarious
portrait of a family--faulty, cracked, enraging--and of a man struggling to lea
rn the nature of his origins.
