Be with Me Always: Essays

by Randon Billings Noble

"Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!" Thus does Heathcliff beg his dead Cathy in Wuthering Heights. He wants to be haunted—he insists on it. Randon Billings Noble does too. Instead of exorcising the ghosts of her past, she hopes for their cold hands to knock at the window and to linger. Be with Me Always is a collection of essays that explore hauntedness by considering how the ghosts of our pasts cling to us.

In a way, all good essays are about the things that haunt us until we have somehow embraced or understood them. Here, Noble considers the ways she has been haunted—by a near-death experience, the gaze of a nude model, thoughts of widowhood, Anne Boleyn's violent death, a book she can't stop reading, a past lover who shadows her thoughts—in essays both pleasant and bitter, traditional and lyrical, and persistently evocative and unforgettable.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir

186 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2019

About the author

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her full-length essay collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in March 2019 and her lyric essay anthology A Harp in the Stars is forthcoming from Nebraska in October 2021. Individual essays have appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, The Massachusetts Review, The Georgia Review, Brevity, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. Currently she is the Founding Editor of After the Art.

Reviews

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ll be honest here: I requested this solely because of the cover. I am a huge fan of anatomical hearts on covers and something about this cover and the title just spoke to me. Thankfully, this was absolutely worth reading.

The essays in this collection are for the most part wonderfully constructed. The author uses literature and other works of art to draw comparisons to her own life. This is something I particularly enjoy when it is well done and I thought it worked really well here.

The essay that worked best for me is the title essay – drawing on themes of Wuthering Height, a book I personally really appreciate, Noble carefully presents her own thoughts. I appreciated the way she mixes the personal with the literary to form a cohesive whole.

I have to admit that I did not find this collection spectacular and I am not sure it will particularly stick with me, but I will definitely check out whatever the author does next.

I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and University of Nebraska Press in exchange for an honest review.

[Gayle Pritchard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This first effort book of essays by Billings Noble is an absolutely beautiful book. I had already read her limited edition and visually stunning chapbook, Devotional. It had moved me to tears, and even holding it felt precious, deep. Be With Me Always is beautifully written, and unlike anything I have ever read. Her style is evident from the first page, and she effectively utilizes her quirkiness (quotes, rabbit-hole facts and factoids, playing with form) to cast a spell on the reader. I especially loved these essays: Elegy for Dracula, Leaving the Island and The Sparkling Future. I eagerly look forward to see what she writes next. I think as she matures, her voice and observations will only dive to deeper depths.

[Therese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Approaching an essay collection can be a little intimidating - I tend to think, "Oh dear, will these essays be plodding and educational?" But this gorgeous essay collection on the theme of hauntedness is like nothing I've read in a very long time: as captivating as a gothic novel, as riveting as a tell-all memoir, as sweeping and lyrical and thought-provoking as the best sort of poetry. And, yes, educational, but more soaring than plodding. The essays are as short, sharp-edged, and brilliantly colored by earthly experience as gemstones. I found the book hard to put down and I wanted to leap from one essay to the next to be plunged once again into the author's rich inner and outer worlds.

In these pages you'll find love: passionate, illicit, wholesome, mad, motherly, wifely, deadly, bookish, and brave. With any luck, as I was, you'll be awakened to the marvelous and protean potential of the essay as a literary form. I noticed a couple of other reviews have criticized the book as if it were a memoir, for failing to be a proper memoir, and have thereby missed the whole point that this is an assemblage of reflections and memories and yearnings, but not a book-length sequential narrative of a life. Such an assemblage has the potential to be laborious for the reader, presenting us with the task of piecing together that narrative for ourselves, but Noble has constructed her collage so artfully that for me it didn't at all feel laborious or disconnected and the outlines of her life emerge through the roughly chronological ordering of the essays.

[Caroline Bock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Be With Me Always will stay with me... these lyrical essay observe the world closely, intensely. Many of the essays are about how we see as writers... as young mothers... as lovers... many have literary overtones, invoking Robinson Crusoe, Dracula and so many others. I love how she observes silence in her essay, "On Silence," (it is never silent). Her observance even includes an essay "On Looking" and her collection ends with a moving "Devotions."

Kudos.

Caroline....

and for other ways to look at the world....consider... my Carry Her Home...
46 stories (plus, one work of creative nonfiction snuck in!)

[Melissa Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a stunning collection by one of my favorite essayists. The writing has guts and heart. I highly recommend!

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Each essay in this collection invited, challenged, and surprised me. I loved the variety of forms--one shaped like a spinal column, one as a WebMD article, one as a pharmacological compound summary, one as the Divine Office, and more. Beyond that, I appreciated the courage of this author to speak what many would not dare: fears of the all-consuming nature of motherhood, the sticky hold of past relationships, and temptations and fantasies of various kinds. And woven throughout is a love of language and literature that drew this former English major right in. If I had to choose, though, my favorite essay is probably the "plainest," if that could apply at all to this collection: "Yet Another Day at the Jersey Shore." I loved every moment from waking to sleeping, and all of the sweet and sandy moments in between. Highly recommended.

[Karen K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir takes many risks with form and chronology. The payoff is a gorgeous collection of personal essays plunging courageously into love, peri-natal depression, motherhood, memory, illness. Exquisite, poetic prose, very soul-searching, yet understated.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5–love the play of forms and literary reference throughout. Some essays pulled me in more than others. Lots of contemplative pieces—I appreciate the personal memoir type essays she creates more than the philosophical. Happy collections like these are getting published!

[Tim Bascom · Rating 4 out of 5]

BE WITH ME ALWAYS is a rich read--full of relational insight. The essays have a risky "out there" feel because the author, Randon Billings Noble, is not afraid to explore her own raw emotions. I relate to her inclination to go back in time, exploring the relationships that haunt her the most. Like her, I look back at moments when relationships heated up or teetered on the brink of dissolving or when, after a particularly hard break-up, I feared that maybe I would remain forever alone, clearly “incompatible.”

Noble, at times, seems in the thrall of an extreme desire for an impossibly intense romantic bond—which manifests most strongly when she describes a past lover who was, in a sense, her own personal “Dracula.” Her essays, which rely on surprising literary comparisons, bring to mind the forbidden relational dimensions in many stories and movies, reminding us how tantalizing those dimensions can be while at the same time raising the specter of emotional pain. Falling in love with Dracula is bound to end poorly because of his nature and because of the obsession he arouses. And the stories of star-crossed lovers are inevitably full of thwarted desire and loss. Somebody is going to get hurt.

One of the times Noble seems to stretch a bit too far for a relational analogy is when she likens herself to Ann Boleyn, admiring “the power to captivate a man, to enchant him, to possess him so fully that he thought of little else.” For Boleyn, the man in question was Henry the VIII, who repeatedly divorced or beheaded wives because of being so captivated. Boleyn must have known, at some level, what she was risking, and Noble seems a bit too willing to romanticize what was essentially pathological. But she probably knows this, and she bravely explores the terrain anyway.

I respect her intent to stay faithful to the man she eventually marries, letting go of the haunting lovers of her past and becoming a mother even though her unexpected twins threaten her sense of a future self. And I respect her honest admission that she is still sometimes haunted or pulled to the side romantically, as in her remarkably inventive essay “The Heart as a Torn Muscle.” Noble's open admissions help me—and probably many other readers—to work through some of the hard-to-process subterranean stuff that we feel but never talk about.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would gladly recommend this collection to any lover of non-fiction. The essays are bold, insightful, and frank, written without any pretension or concern with our opinion of the author. The writing shows lack of concern for our opinion of itself, too, avoiding that too-common crowd-pleasing feel that the work wants desperately to be approved of. And frankly, when first reading through, I often didn’t like it. The prose itself was always superb, but essays here and there had me wanting to argue with her point or outright “what the hell”-ing. Yet the essays have stuck around, demanding to be turned over in my mind and re-read, and I’ve grown increasingly convinced of their brilliance. If I didn’t have such great disdain for the phrase, I might say the collection has changed the way I love.

The essays in the collection vary widely in form—from parody of an online medical article to an inventory of Noble’s grandmother’s jewelry to an examination of Tylenol’s chemical makeup to good old fashioned narrative—and Noble commands each well. Despite the variety, the collection works as a cohesive whole. A smooth arc is seen in how the feeling and understanding within each essay evolves, the handful of recurring characters get revealed and explored piece by piece, and a thread of hauntedness ties the work together. The arrangement of the essays works wonderfully with only a few exceptions; e.g., “Split” doesn’t feel right at the start but lands there on its merits as likely the best essay in the collection, and “Another Day at the Jersey Shore” might fit better elsewhere but is placed where it is out of consideration for pacing. These details do little to get in the way of Noble’s powerful writing.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know that feeling when you finally think of a word that has been on the tip of your tongue and you know that it is the only word that perfectly describes the situation you are in? That is the same feeling I had when I read through Randon Billings Noble's essays about hauntedness and heartbreak in Be With Me Always; finally, these feelings that I've spent my whole life trying to put into words was on paper. Noble does something amazing with her essays on the crushing feelings of the heart. They are both personal and universal. Her essays are filled with deep vulnerability as they contain some extreme detail. Yet this vulnerability and detail make her themes more relatable. I found this especially in her “Heart As A Torn Muscle” hermit crab essay, as it talks about an earth-shattering crush on someone. While her essay was about a very specific feeling about a very specific feeling, I found myself relating to those feelings as I recalled similar situations in my own love life. I could tell it was extremely personal to her. And yet, I felt that the poem was personal to me and it even belonged to me since I felt I could relate to it so much. In addition, Noble somehow makes these very universal feelings dramatic and gothic as if the works belonged in a Bronte novel. How often do we feel like our own hauntedness of past lives and lovers are as romantic as those found in classic novels? It fits perfectly.
Overall, this was a very enjoyable read and I will definitely be anxious to see more of Noble’s works.

[Carley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bold, interesting, insightful, nostalgic. Randon Billings Noble is a master at creating engaging experiences that are universally relatable in some way or another to everyone. Her words are haunting and lyrical, bringing attention to the smallest feelings, emotions, and details. In her book of essays entitled, “Be With Me Always,” Noble brings many experiences to light. Near-death experiences, historic references, thoughts and ponderings of life, and brilliant ideas are what make these essays so riveting. Some essays are haunting and caused me to sit and ponder my own thoughts on certain subjects, such as death, love, and history. Other essays are heart-wrenching and kept me at the edge of my seat.
Many ideas that are expressed are poignant and deep. The thought that near-death experiences give us an urge to do something more important with our lives, the sense that we all have an urge to be connected, that the body is stretched beyond capacity and is still beautiful, that the heart can betray its own body, we create our own stories and are the narrators; that love can hurt as well as heal, we can’t control how other people choose to live their lives, we don’t know everything about everyone, wishes are granted in unexpected ways, unraveling isn’t the same as destruction, silence can be kind, and everything is intentional.
In short, Noble was able to touch me with her words and her writings. Poignant and showing understanding of the world in a unique way, I fell in love with her writing. Highly recommend!

[Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love lyrical essays, but at times I struggled with some of the craft and content decisions here. I found the first two sections the strongest, the most connected to haunting and being haunted, and I did genuinely enjoy them. But afterward the essays began to lose me: either they reiterated emotional and narrative points that had come earlier, or they diverged into other scenes so much that the main relationship to other essays only felt like Billings Noble's intense interiority. Especially in "On Looking" and "The Ownership of Memory," this interiority betrayed an uncomfortable lack of knowledge beyond the speaker's self, liberal and perhaps well-intentioned but unengaged with context, history, identity, and community, and thus not well-executed or appropriately impactful. And while I liked how the essays played with form and comparison, the reliance on literary analysis sometimes felt distracting or limiting, and so often sentences centered around weaker linking verbs when an elevation of line-to-line writing could have helped so much!

[Gayle (OutsmartYourShelf) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A discussion of Wuthering Heights always draws me in, and so I was intrigued to read this collection of essays on the heart and on the hauntings of our past. The author, Randon Billings Noble (no relation that I'm aware of), examines, amongst other things, how our past loves can linger on into our future and how pregnancy can sometimes feel more like an invasion.

Like most compilations of essays, these were a bit hit and miss, with some really grabbing the attention whilst others were more of a skim through. The book won't be to everyone's taste - I enjoyed it overall but I probably wouldn't reread it.

Thanks to NetGalley and publishers, University of Nebraska Press, for the opportunity to review an ARC.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This essay collection took my breath away. There were multiple times I nearly jumped out of my chair because something Noble wrote resonated so deeply within me that I felt as if I could have written it (though clearly I did not, and as a result I am not a writer and she is). Two of the entries brought me to tears, which is no small feat. I reread the first three essays immediately (before moving onto the fourth) because I couldn't quite believe that she had written this book as much for me, the singular me, as she did for herself or a wider audience. I'm enchanted by Noble, and will be following her career accordingly, and reading this again at least twice a year, I'm sure.

[Jenn McKee · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a writer who's looking to publish more essays herself, I read the first several essays of "Be With Me Always" - after hearing Randon do a reading at the Hippocamp conference in 2019 - and had that moment of awe, when you think, "What's the point of even trying?! I'll never write with this level of literary mastery and gorgeousness!" But then there were a few essays that seemed more focused on exploring a particular form than connecting me intimately with the writer, and while they were still impressively accomplished, I didn't feel the same immediacy with the writer - and truthfully, I kind of mourned it. Still, much is wow-worthy here, so I'd definitely recommend it.

[Dorothy Bendel · Rating 5 out of 5]

These essays are tethered by the idea of "hauntings" - relationships, motherhood, memories, literature, and so much more. This is a fascinating collection to read in how Noble digs deep into these hauntings through form. A study of silence, an essay shaped like a spinal column, another in the form of medical advice... I looked forward to seeing where this collection would take me each time I sat down and started reading again.

[HollyLovesBooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting collection of essays that weave together personal stories of the author’ Life and works of literature. This seems at first like it would have the reader question if it will work, and it does. A few minor issues but overall, I enjoyed this collection and felt like the author conveyed a general theme throughout. This could have been a bit cleaner but it wasn’t enough of a negative to put me off reading.
Overall, a decent job.
#BeWithMeAlways #NetGalley

[Susanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good, consistent collection of essays about being haunted by people, places, books, and ideas. I think my favorite part were the first few essays, which were almost a brief memoir about past loves and the love of the idea of vampires. Noble does interesting work with innovative forms, which she handles with a deftness that is deceptive--she makes it look easy to work simple, evocative language into creative means of expression.

[Beth Younge · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really struggled with this. Whilst I liked Noble's writing style, this book wasn't for me. I managed to read a decent chunk of it and was getting nothing from her writing. Normally, I get on well with autobiographical essays but I did not connect with the authorial voice at all and each one I finished left me with a feeling of 'blah'.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Stella · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice little collection of essays/short stories that falls in the trap that so many other collections do - some are good, some are just okay. Using literary references and historical facts to align with a personal narrative, this collection shows great potential for future works.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

[Sadie Seroxcat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well crafted essays which combine personal history with favourite literary works in a very poignant and enjoyable way. I would certainly recommend, use excerpts as examples of autobiographical writing and also give to friends as a gift.

Thanks to Netgalley and Unuversity of Nebraska Press for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

[Mieke Eerkens · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a huge fan of nonfiction writing that pushes boundaries of form and challenges people's perceptions of what can be done artistically with the genre. Randon Billings Noble does that with this collection of beautiful, imaginative essays. Love!

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a joy to read this collection of essays, which feel like essays in the classical sense of the word because they meditated, breathe, and macrame meaning. But an additional joy is that they also innovated. I love the later essays that play with form and read as poems.

[Vonetta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fantastic! Noble approaches essays in ways in which I wasn’t expecting; she challenged my notions of what an essay can and should be. I found myself inspired, thinking of my own essays I could write once I felt free from the boundaries I’d imposed upon myself.

[Fred Zirm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Occasionally overwrought but more often innovative, candid, and heart-wrenching, these personal essays take a brutally honest look at the author's emotional life and end up holding the mirror up to our own as well. Not for the faint of heart but very rewarding.

[Eileen · Rating 3 out of 5]

***½
Love the theme of this essay collection (what haunts us, memories) and the writing is lovely. Some of them I felt weren’t as approachable as others, but the beautiful thing about essays is relaying your own experience. So relatability isn’t always the goal.

{library, paperback}

[Christine Corrigan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A master of craft, Randon Billings Noble wrote a breathtaking collection of intelligent essays. This is a must read for anyone who aspires to write essays.

[Carole Duff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, lyrical, personal and honest essays. I wish I could write this well.

[Clifford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although not exactly a memoir, any collection of personal essays like this one has that feeling, although the form allows the author to pursue tangents and digressions that are often fascinating.