num_pages: 208
description: 
  
    A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
  
   
  In the winter of 2000, shortly after his mother's death, Donald Antrim began writing about his family. In pieces that appeared in The New Yorker and were anthologized in Best American Essays, Antrim explored his intense and complicated relationships with his mother, Louanne, an artist, teacher, and ferociously destabilizing alcoholic; his gentle grandfather, who lived in the mountains of North Carolina and who always hoped to save his daughter from herself; and his father, who married his mother twice. The Afterlife is an elliptical, sometimes tender, sometimes blackly hilarious portrait of a family--faulty, cracked, enraging--and of a man struggling to learn the nature of his origins.

language: English
title: The Afterlife
titlecomplete: The Afterlife
genres: Biography Memoir, Family, Biography, Memoir, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 540
awards: awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Ambassador Book Award
category: Autobiography, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Autobiography
publisher: Picador