Perdita: On Loss

by Dylan Riley

An intense literary memoir of love and grief"Our marriage was, from any conventional point of view, wildly implausible; and you, my dear son, are the miraculous product of this beautiful, rather crazy, and all too brief love affair."When Dylan Riley received the devastating news that his wife, Emanuela, had cancer, he began writing blog posts describing the anguish and disarray brought by her worsening symptoms. Perdita is written for their teenage son, Eamon.It is a lyrical memoir of a marriage, from their heady first encounters in Rome. It is also a raw and moving account of a bereavement. Cancer, Riley reflects, is a pitiless opponent. It drains hope of its power and turns it into self-delusion. Living with cancer is to experience a progressive foreshortening of time.Next year might be terrible, but there can be a few good months now; tomorrow will likely be bad, but let's focus on today. Riley finds that hope itself, that tricky and dangerous emotion, grows out of the soil of our mortality, and of the mortality of those we love.Perdita offers no advice. It tries more simply to represent a lost connection. "I wanted the world to know what it had it had lost," he explains, "and maybe in knowing it to make her live again."

Genres: Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

Published October 29, 2024

About the author

Dylan Riley is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and is on the editorial committee of New Left Review.

Reviews

[JC Sevart · Rating 5 out of 5]

what an incredible read, I like the way he tells almost irrelevant stories but convey how ever present people we grieve are in the mundanities of life.

[dominique · Rating 4 out of 5]

i haven't cried over a book in two years. guess it was time again.

[Yukinosita Yukino · Rating 5 out of 5]

the best thing I read in 2025 btw