Idgie Says:What a sweet book. Not sweet in a twee way, but just filled with love and promise and.... well, finding the hope. I teared up at more than a few of the stories. But teary with a smile ended those chapters.
Heather, an obituary writer in a small Alaska town where everyone knows each other and looks out for each other - well, she works hard to find the good in everyone.
From her obituaries where the only good thing she could find was "She kept a clean stove", to the unexpected death that caused, voluntarily, the entire town to give up a day's livelihood to make sure the almost grown children made it home safely after a father falls overboard, then gathering together to raise funds to create safety gear for the fisherman, these stories are sharp and alive and life affirming.
This is not just a slim book of obituary stories - these are stories of her family, her friends and her town. The book makes you feel a lot and think a little harder about just relaxing a tad and enjoying life a bit more.
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Find The Good
Heather Lende
Algonquin Press
April 2015
As the obituary writer in a spectacularly beautiful but often dangerous spit of land in Alaska, Heather Lende knows something about last words and lives well lived. Now she’s distilled what she’s learned about how to live a more exhilarating and meaningful life into three words: find the good. It’s that simple--and that hard.
Quirky and profound, individual and universal, Find the Good offers up short chapters that help us unlearn the habit--and it is a habit--of seeing only the negatives. Lende reminds us that we can choose to see any event--starting a new job or being laid off from an old one, getting married or getting divorced--as an opportunity to find the good. As she says, “We are all writing our own obituary every day by how we live. The best news is that there’s still time for additions and revisions before it goes to press.”
Ever since Algonquin published her first book, the New York Times bestseller If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name, Heather Lende has been praised for her storytelling talent and her plainspoken wisdom. The Los Angeles Times called her “part Annie Dillard, part Anne Lamott,” and that comparison has never been more apt as she gives us a fresh, positive perspective from which to view our relationships, our obligations, our priorities, our community, and our world.
An antidote to the cynicism and self-centeredness that we are bombarded with every day in the news, in our politics, and even at times in ourselves, Find the Good helps us rediscover what’s right with the world.