Maryanne O'Hara
Author, grieving mother, quotidian philosopher, optimist ✨
LITTLE MATCHES, A Memoir of Grief and Light, published by HarperOne Books, is now on sale.
It is a People Magazine Book of the Week and my story has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Psychology Today, Kirkus, and TIME Magazine.
LITTLE MATCHES is inspired by 9LivesNotes.com, a blog that I kept while my daughter Caitlin was waiting for a lung transplant. Since Caitlin’s passing, I have also been certified by the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine as an end-of-life doula, so that I may better speak to the state of end-of-life care in our culture.
I am also the author of the novel CASCADE, which was the Boston Globe Book Club’s inaugural pick and a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award, and a story collection which was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. I am the former associate fiction editor of the literary journal Ploughshares, and I've taught creative writing at Emerson College and Clark University.
Begin to read/watch book trailer/more at https://linktr.ee/maryanneohara
Thank you.
“Already, with the city behind them, New York didn't feel quite real. As if reality only existed where she existed.”
“Isn't it strange, Dez, that we never see certain parts of ourselves? Our backs, our lungs, our hearts. We never know what it really is to sit across from ourselves.”
“Life is full of tough choices between less-than-perfect alternatives.”
“No, normalcy is taken for granted until it's gone.”
“Now was not the time to be sentimental. As a child, she'd been ridiculously sentimental about loss, about time passing.”
“Maybe all men should have to fight for something sometime in their lives. I'm thirty-three years old and I've never had to fight for a blessed thing, have I?”
“So many people came into your life, and they were such a part of the everyday that it was impossible to imagine them gone until, one day, they were.”
“She gave in to a hankering for a cup of tea even though she knew that the idea of a cup of tea-sitting still, calmly sipping-was more appealing than actually sitting still and trying to calmly sip.”
“You want, you want, you want; when you're so lucky to have, to have, to have.”
“I do urge you to welcome children. Even one child will make a difference in your life that you cannot fathom. I promise you, my girl.”