Thinking About "The Long Goodbye"

"This sturdy belief system [that if one just tries hard enough, things will work out] has a sidecar in which superstition rides."

That's a sentence I like very much even if motorcycles with sidecars seem to be a rarity these days.

In fact, it may be the most memorable single sentence in "The Long Goodbye," a memoir poet Megan O'Rourke wrote about prolonged grief during and in the wake of her mother's death from cancer at age 55. I read the book because I liked a poem O'Rourke wrote that was recently published in The New York Times  Sunday Magazine.  In an earlier post, I wrote about the poem ("Self-Portrait as Myself") because it relates to my novella "Gina/Diane."