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A Memoir
by Justin Taylor
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.
"This memoir sets a new literary standard for [Justin 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...A greater literary achievement than Taylor's impressive fiction." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Though the subject matter is weighty and knotty, Taylor's approach is light; he 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
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." - Lauren Groff, author of Florida
"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." - Jenny Offill, author of Weather
"In propulsive 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." - Emily Gould, author of Perfect Tunes
"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." - Sarah Gerard, author of True Love
This information about Riding with the Ghost was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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