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Windower
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.
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.
196 pages, Paperback
Published October 7, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 3, 2026
banger line after banger line. most honest thing i’ve ever read.
November 10, 2025
Neither hero nor insect
July 15, 2026
"A colleague whose husband died corners me in the hall and says, 'If I believed in heaven, I would commit suicide'" (57).
"'Everyone asks me how she did it,' MJ says. 'The worst are the ones who think they're kind.' It's normal, though, people wanting to know. It's normal if you wanted to hear the sentence" (108)
"Until my early twenties I assumed every book was self-help, which was why I liked books even though I hadn't read may. They helped. They helped the self. But this was, as they say, a misapprehension, which college can be good for adjusting. Books were all sorts of things, hardly ever self-help. There were such things as self-help books but you shouldn't read them. In fact there is no self, a fact which you had to learn from books. Now I was twenty-one, twenty-two" (140).
"'Everyone asks me how she did it,' MJ says. 'The worst are the ones who think they're kind.' It's normal, though, people wanting to know. It's normal if you wanted to hear the sentence" (108)
"Until my early twenties I assumed every book was self-help, which was why I liked books even though I hadn't read may. They helped. They helped the self. But this was, as they say, a misapprehension, which college can be good for adjusting. Books were all sorts of things, hardly ever self-help. There were such things as self-help books but you shouldn't read them. In fact there is no self, a fact which you had to learn from books. Now I was twenty-one, twenty-two" (140).
October 10, 2025
This is a masterpiece of sorrow, but also joy. A contemplative pleasure to read: Loughran's prose-poetic style, deep intelligence, and wild honesty crafts a narrative so poignant and rich that it flows with feeling from quite literally the first to last sentence.
I like to measure the quality of a book by how often it forces me to stop reading: to look up and out and think more about what it's saying to me, rest with it and absorb it before moving on. It is likely to not be believed, but Windower did this to me with every page.
I like to measure the quality of a book by how often it forces me to stop reading: to look up and out and think more about what it's saying to me, rest with it and absorb it before moving on. It is likely to not be believed, but Windower did this to me with every page.
October 15, 2025
Devastating and beautiful. I finished it in one sitting and will reread again. I think this is the most courageous and raw book I have ever read.
I am not eloquent and suck at writing a review but I absolutely loved this.
I am not eloquent and suck at writing a review but I absolutely loved this.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews