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Be with Me Always

Essays

Randon Billings Noble

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Imprint: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 03/2019
Pages: 174
Subject: Literary Collections
eBook ISBN: 9781496213686

DESCRIPTION

"Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!" Thus does Heathcliff beg his dead Cathy in Wuthering Heights. He wants to be haunted—he insists on it. Randon Billings Noble does too. Instead of exorcising the ghosts of her past, she hopes for their cold hands to knock at the window and to linger. Be with Me Always is a collection of essays that explore hauntedness by considering how the ghosts of our pasts cling to us. In a way, all good essays are about the things that haunt us until we have somehow embraced or understood them. Here, Noble considers the ways she has been haunted—by a near-death experience, the gaze of a nude model, thoughts of widowhood, Anne Boleyn's violent death, a book she can't stop reading, a past lover who shadows her thoughts—in essays both pleasant and bitter, traditional and lyrical, and persistently evocative and unforgettable.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her work has been published in the Modern Love column of the New York Times, the Georgia Review, Fourth Genre, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. Her essay "The Heart as a Torn Muscle," originally published in Brevity, was listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2016.      

REVIEWS

"A motley collection of pieces. . . . Essayist Noble has a focused, tight style, often employing the technique of looking at somewhat discrete items (or memories) and seeking connections among them. . . . Unique eyes look at familiar things and somehow make them seem both odder and more familiar."—Kirkus

"In her brilliant collection Be with Me Always, Randon Billings Noble explores the frailty of romance, of the human body, and of us all, with startling honesty, admirable ingenuity, genuine insight, and, always, with energy and surprise."—Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire

"A marvel. These essays are lyrical and innovative. . . . Dracula is a guide to a first love, Robinson Crusoe carries her through pregnancy with twins, Terry Tempest Williams helps her survive a cancer diagnosis, and E. M. Forster and Facebook help her manage the strange faces at her high school reunion. I admire Noble and her essays very much."—Ned Stuckey-French, author of The American Essay in the American Century

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