After the Eclipse A Mothers Murder a Daughters Search

A fierce memoir of a mother’s murder, a daughter’s coming-of-age in the wake of immense loss, and her mission to know the woman who gave her life.

When Sarah Perry was 12, she saw a partial eclipse of the sun, an event she took as a sign of good fortune for her and her mother, Crystal. But that brief moment of darkness ultimately foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine, just a few feet from Sarah’s bedroom.

The killer escaped unseen; it would take the police 12 years to find him, time in which Sarah grew into adulthood, struggling with abandonment, police interrogations, and the effort of rebuilding her life when so much had been lost. Through it all she would dream of the eventual trial, a conviction — all her questions finally answered. But after the trial, Sarah’s questions only grew. She wanted to understand her mother’s life, not just her final hours, and so she began a personal investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, taking her deep into the abiding darkness of a small American town.

Told in searing prose, After the Eclipse is a luminous memoir of uncomfortable truth and terrible beauty, an exquisite memorial for a mother stolen from her daughter, and a blazingly successful attempt to cast light on her life once more.

“Sarah Perry’s book is smooth, beautiful, and breathtaking. I can’t quite get over it — her mastery of the language, the narrative, and the landscape of the devastated heart.” Roxana Robinson, author of Cost and Sparta

“What strikes me so strongly about this excellent memoir is that — considering the subject matter — the writer was able to organize it at all. It’s sometimes disarmingly astute, and what it says about the ties that bind, at the same moment they sometimes get stretched way beyond capacity, elaborates not just this singular drama, but provides a painful, and wincingly real, statement about class in America.” Ann Beattie, award-winning author of The State We’re In: Maine Stories, The New Yorker Stories, and more

"In an accomplished debut memoir, a daughter struggles to understand the life of her mother, who was murdered when the author was 12...deft pacing and vivid portraits result in an absorbing mystery and a forthright memoir of abiding grief." Kirkus Reviews

“After the Eclipse is a tragedy set in motion by the vicious murder of a plucky young woman, the author’s mother. It’s a tender elegy for her too, and for the life she made with and for her daughter. Crystal Perry was much more than a victim, and Sarah Perry gives her vibrant life here. She does the same for the small, working class Maine town they both grew up in: the woes passed down through generations; the feelings (rage and guilt, grief), acted out but mostly unspoken. Perry writes with unerring power and hard-won wisdom.” Margo Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Negroland: A Memoir

"Raw and perfect...I've never read a better depiction of how a sudden, violent event rips through a human being's apprehension of reality...[It's] an unfussy, richly textured remembrance of a town, a family, a particular place on the planet that its author knows all the way down to her bones — the strengths of a classic memoir...After the Eclipse [has] an eerie, heartbreaking power that it shares with the very best of true crime." Laura Miller, Slate

"Stunning." --Entertainment Weekly - "Raw and perfect." --Laura Miller, Slate
"Heartbreaking yet hopeful." --Samantha Irby, Marie Claire

A fierce memoir of a mother's murder, a daughter's coming-of-age in the wake of immense loss, and her mission to know the woman who gave her life.

When Sarah Perry was twelve, she saw a partial eclipse of the sun, an event she took as a sign of good fortune for her and her mother, Crystal. But that brief moment of darkness ultimately foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine, just a few feet from Sarah's bedroom.

The killer escaped unseen; it would take the police twelve years to find him, time in which Sarah grew into adulthood, struggling with abandonment, police interrogations, and the effort of rebuilding her life when so much had been lost. Through it all she would dream of the eventual trial, a conviction--all her questions finally answered. But after the trial, Sarah's questions only grew. She wanted to understand her mother's life, not just her final hours, and so she began a personal investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, taking her deep into the abiding darkness of a small American town.

Told in searing prose, After the Eclipse is a luminous memoir of uncomfortable truth and terrible beauty, an exquisite memorial for a mother stolen from her daughter, and a blazingly successful attempt to cast light on her life once more.

"Stunning." --Entertainment Weekly

"Raw and perfect." --Laura Miller, Slate

"Heartbreaking yet hopeful." --Samantha Irby, Marie Claire

" Perry] is a wonderful writer...Beauty and tenderness rise up through the darkness... She] succeeds in restoring her mother's humanity, and her own." --Bliss Broyard, The New York Times Book Review

A fierce memoir of a mother's murder, a daughter's coming-of-age in the wake of immense loss, and her mission to know the woman who gave her life.

When Sarah Perry was twelve, she saw a partial eclipse of the sun, an event she took as a sign of good fortune for her and her mother, Crystal. But that brief moment of darkness ultimately foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine, just a few feet from Sarah's bedroom.

The killer escaped unseen; it would take the police twelve years to find him, time in which Sarah grew into adulthood, struggling with abandonment, police interrogations, and the effort of rebuilding her life when so much had been lost. Through it all she would dream of the eventual trial, a conviction--all her questions finally answered. But after the trial, Sarah's questions only grew. She wanted to understand her mother's life, not just her final hours, and so she began a personal investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, taking her deep into the abiding darkness of a small American town.

Told in searing prose, After the Eclipse is a luminous memoir of uncomfortable truth and terrible beauty, an exquisite memorial for a mother stolen from her daughter, and a blazingly successful attempt to cast light on her life once more.

Sarah Perry holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University, where she served as publisher of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and was a member of the journal's nonfiction editorial board. She is the recipient of a Writers' Fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation and a Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education, and has attended residencies at Norton Island in Maine and PLAYA in Oregon. Perry's prose has appeared in Blood and Thunder magazine and Bluestockings Literary Journal. She lives in Brooklyn.

George Saunders recently wrote that the process of revision, as he goes about it, is “a form of increasing the ambient intelligence of a piece of writing.” You crank out some prose, then make adjustments — tiny and not so tiny — until the prose is better. Then you do it again. Then, you do it again...

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