Synopses & Reviews
An unflinching memoir about a writer reckoning with his relationship with his troubled father and the complicated legacy that each generation hands down to the next
When Justin Taylor was thirty, his father, Larry, drove to the top of the Nashville 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 Taylor thinks of his father, and how he thinks of himself as a son.
Moving back and forth in time from that day, Riding with the Ghost captures the past's power to shape, strengthen, and distort our visions of ourselves and one another. We see Larry 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 Taylor 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; as a man, struggling to understand his relationship to his religion and himself.
With raw intimacy, Riding with the Ghost lays bare the joys and burdens of loving a troubled family member. It's a memoir about fathers and sons, teachers and students, faith and illness, and the pieces of our loved ones that we carry with us.
Review
"Taylor's relentless, peripatetic, and tender search for reconciliation with his late troubled father...a full-throated song of joy about his own life lived through music, teaching, travel, and literature....gorgeously layered and deeply felt." Lauren Groff, author of Florida
Review
"[A] deeply reflective, sensitive narrative...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." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"[Taylor] has a knack for unobtrusive description...and sudden flashes of cutting insight....This is an astute and balanced memoir that finds grace in appreciating another's pain." Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Justin Taylor is the author of the short-story collections Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and Flings, and the novel The Gospel of Anarchy. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Sewanee Review, n+1, The New York Times Book Review, and Literary Hub. He lives in Portland, Oregon.