Advance Praise for
Starting with Goodbye:
A Daughter's Memoir of Love after Loss
"Lisa Romeo's compelling memoir is both a loving tribute to her adored father and a clear-eyed portrait of their complicated relationship. Reading it, you can't help but reflect on your own familial bonds—but you may also find, as I did, that Lisa's lovely writing and startling insights lead you into deeper territory, as she wrestles with questions of identity, mortality, and the vagaries of love."
— Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train and A Piece of the World
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“This book is a treasure. Lisa Romeo’s writing is an enormous comfort, reminding us that our relationships with loved ones never truly end, even in death.”
— Allison Gilbert, author of Passed and Present: Keeping Memories of Loved Ones Alive, Always Too Soon: Voices of Support for Those Who Have Lost Both Parents, and Parentless Parents: How the Loss of Our Mothers and Fathers Impacts the Way We Raise Our Children
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"Starting with Goodbye lives in the realm of the imagination where love continues beyond grief, where the living and the dead meet and sometimes know each other more deeply than life's demands and circumstances allowed. Lisa Romeo is a writer with exquisite restraint and precision, recounting a compelling, spiritually adventurous tale. A beautiful, honest, sometimes troubling, and triumphant book.”
— Richard Hoffman, author of Half the House and Love & Fury
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"Lisa Romeo wanders through the territory of grief, its borders are blurred and variable, an unexpected land with room to connect with and understand her deceased dad in a deeply profound way. Written with careful and unwavering self-reflection, unraveling memories and inviting readers to glimpse the particular tenderness and complexity of their relationship. Her story inspires hope that love and reconciliation can bridge the space between life and death."
— Melanie Brooks, author of Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma
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"Driven by curiosity, written with great tenderness, and executed with quiet mastery, Starting with Goodbye is a daughter’s love letter to her father. It is also a welcome reminder that our most intimate relationships don’t end with death but are transformed over time if our hearts are open, our spirits are attuned to mystery, and we are willing to carry on a different kind of conversation.”
— Katrina Kenison, author of Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment and The Gift of an Ordinary Day
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"This is a brave and vulnerable book, like The Year of Magical Thinking. The energy of this book is leaping off the page with internal struggle. The writing moved me—gorgeous sentences. I felt the narrator's presence so strongly and felt so connected to what she was going through, and what she had lost. It so beautifully reflects the 'stuckness' of grief, with a lack of sentimentality that is powerful."
— Laraine Herring, author of Lost Fathers; Writing Begins With the Breath; The Writing Warrior; and Ghost Swamp Blues
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"Rich, intelligent, thoughtful, personal and investigative. What stands out is the voice, continuing to probe and wonder, open still to discovering what might be true about this interesting life. Just the kind of character we like to follow around. Intensely emotional without being maudlin."
— Barbara Hurd, author of Tidal Rhythms and Listening to the Savage
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"Lisa Romeo's writing is beautifully poetic. Her story is one that all daughters of difficult fathers will want to read."
— Sue Kushner Resnick, author of You Saved Me Too, and Goodbye Wifes and Daughters
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“Starting with Goodbye is an inspirational book, filled with nuance, complexity, layers, and honesty, true to the human psyche and our most compelling relationships. Fine writing, humor, metaphors, wry insights and observations that grab you and hold you connected with the author on her sometimes funny and sometimes sorrowful, but always insightful journey of the self through the love after loss and on-going relationship with her father. The writing is terrific: phrases to linger over, whole sentences and paragraphs to underline and return to, evocative bits and pieces to either cry or laugh out loud. Starting with Goodbye is a true and authentic journey into the self, a journey along a wandering, illuminating path, and readers travel along.”
— Lorraine Mangione, Ph.D., co-author of Daughters, Dads, and the Path Through Grief: Tales from Italian America, and professor of psychology, Antioch University New England
