Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter’s Memoir of Love after Loss

There is so much of ourselves we can see through reading memoir. The one thing that distinguishes one memoir from another is its own powerful story and its ability to connect in some distinct way that draws the reader in on a personal level, leaving an impressionable mark.

Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter’s Memoir of Love and Loss does just that, hurling the reader into the relationship between the author, Lisa Romeo, and her father. Beginning with the writing of her father’s eulogy, she quickly shows the reader the demons she has left to conquer, telling us, “In life, I’d mostly ignored him. In life, my father had not evoked strong emotion in me; maybe I mistook what he did evoke in me as something else.”

We are shown how families are left to deal with loss and death in their own way. For Lisa, she reminisces with the conversations and unexpected visits she and her father have following his death.

It’s a love story between a father and daughter revealing the sadness, bitterness, jealousy, guilt, and hope that one daughter has in trying to remember, and hold onto, loving memories.

I truly enjoyed reading this memorable family account of love and loss.