Question: How do you get over it? Answer: You don't. You don't want to. It makes you who you are. Sean Murphy lost his mother days after her fifty-ninth birthday, following a five-year battle with cancer. In this eloquent memoir, he explores his family history through the context of grief, compassion, faith, and the cultivation of an artistic sensibility. Unfolding in a range of voices, brutal and tender in its portrayal of terminal illness, Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone is an unyielding love story, in which devotion and memory are capable of transcending death. I will be serializing this memoir with a new chapter twice a week, on Friday and Sunday.

A chance encounter in the dark leads eighteen-year-old Daniel and the girl who stumbles across him to profess their love for each other. But this love has conditions: they agree it will last only one hour, and it will be only make-believe. When their hour is up and the girl rushes off like Cinderella, Daniel tries to convince himself that what happened between them seemed perfect only because they were pretending it was. Moments like that happen only in fairy tales. One year and one bad relationship later, his disbelief in love-at-first-sight is stripped away the day he meets Six: a girl with a strange name and an even stranger personality. Unfortunately for Daniel, finding true love doesn’t guarantee a happily ever after . . . it only further threatens it. Will an unbearable secret from the past jeopardize Daniel and Six’s only chance at saving each other?