Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

RIDING WITH THE GHOST

Justin Taylor

A Memoir

A powerful memoir about fathers and sons, teachers and students, faith and illness and the things that each generation hands down to the next.

When Justin Taylor was thirty, his father, Larry, drove to the top of an airport parking garage to take his own life. Thanks to the intervention of family members, he was not successful, but the incident would forever transform how Justin thinks of his father, and how he thinks of himself as a son. RIDING WITH THE GHOST is a memoir about fathers and sons, teachers and students, faith and illness, and the complicated legacy that each generation hands down to the next. It is also a book about dislocation, the search for a place to call home, and contains extended considerations of mental health, addiction, masculinity, and depression.

Moving back and forth in time, RIDING WITH THE GHOST captures the past's power to shape, strengthen, and distort our visions of ourselves and each other. We learn of the author's father's life as the middle child in a chilly Long Island family; as a beloved Little League coach who listens to kids with patience and curiosity; as an unemployed father struggling to keep his marriage together while battling long-term illness and depression. At the same time, Taylor explores how the work of confronting a family member's story forces a reckoning with your own. We see the author as a teacher, modeling himself after his dad's best qualities; as a caregiver, attempting to provide his father with emotional and financial support, but not always succeeding; as a new husband, with a dawning awareness of his own depressive tendencies.

Taylor has previously published two celebrated story collections and a novel. EVERYTHING HERE IS THE BEST THING EVER, a story collection, and THE GOSPEL OF ANARCHY, the novel, were both New York Times Editor's Choice selections. Both story collections, EVERYTHING HERE IS THE BEST THING EVER and FLINGS, were long-listed for The Story Prize. All previous work published by Harpercollins. His fiction has appeared The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and more.

Available products
Book Published 2020-07-21 by Random House

Comments

Riding with the Ghost is a moving and profound portrait of the courage it takes to survive crucibles: financial, emotional, physical, and more. I was mesmerized by the dramatic opening and propelled to the end by a writer who, page-by-page, proved a worthy guide. It's a book full of revelations and insights, written with a spare style and candor that calls to mind the great Raymond Carver.

From the East Coast to the West Coast to the Gulf Coast, Riding with the Ghost is a classic American road narrative, an intimate portrait of a father, the story of an artist's coming-of-age, a statement of faith, and a requiem for all those who have touched our lives yet left too soon. Justin Taylor is a master storyteller, and his voice resounds.

This memoir sets a new literary standard for [Taylor's] work, as he aims higher and reaches deeper. Here, the author shows the precision and command of tone that has informed the best of his stories, but there's something more at stake - for both the writer and his readers... In this deeply reflective, sensitive narrative... there's plenty of additional insightful observations about the stories we tell ourselves and the differences between the way we shape a story and the way we live our lives. A greater literary achievement than Taylor's impressive fiction.

Justin Taylor's relentless, peripatetic, and tender search for reconciliation with his late troubled father blooms into a full-throated song of joy about his own life lived through music, teaching, travel, and literature. Riding With the Ghost is gorgeously layered and deeply felt.

In propulsively readable prose, Justin Taylor does something that most people would find impossible: he delves through grief and trauma to find the true story of his own troubled, brilliant father, and to trace the ways that his father's influence shaped and warped his life and his family. Without being at all polemical, Riding With The Ghost has much to teach us about masculinity, patriarchy and family in America.

An atmospheric, openhearted memoir of great range and ambition. Like his literary hero Denis Johnson, Taylor fearlessly swings from the gutter to the stars and back again in this precisely observed meditation on love and loss.