Love You, Bye

“In these radiant meditations on family, Brenda Miller moves through a lifetime of separation, regret, and hurt to find surprising redemption in caring for her aging parents. This collection is a prism of fondness.” —Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, author of Writing the Sacred Journey, Living Revision, and The Release

“Like light from a stained-glass window, this poignant reflection on daughterhood restores wonder to everything it touches. Miller sets her disparate shards of memory side by side, offering poems and lyric essays with a candid, generous hand until a shimmering portrait of hard-won adulthood emerges. Love You, Bye honors not only her beloved parents but the world as they taught her to observe it, with keen, unflinching, and joyous attention.” —Marjorie Sandor, author of Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime

“Approach this book not as your typical collection of essays and poems, but as a jar of bright beads, cohesively combined yet individually shimmering as they catch the tender reflected light of their subjects: Miller’s aging parents foremost, as well as Miller’s own many stored selves from childhood to early old age. Long admired as an essayist of stunning invention and sensitivity, Miller had me nearly in tears from the outset and wouldn’t let me catch my shaky breath until the very last.” —Robin Hemley, author of How to Change History: A Salvage Project

“To read Brenda Miller’s Love You, Bye is to be nestled within a hummingbird’s miraculous hum, reminding us that everyone and everything that leaves us returns anew. With startling precision, lyrical wonderment, and vulnerable viscerality, the essays and poems woven in Love You, Bye sing forth love and loss from a daughter in equal parts grief and nourishment. Miller writes with transformative intimacy, asking us to consider how we hold and are held by our beloveds, and in what shimmering light: ‘This book is my version of a yahrzeit candle, burning not just for my loved ones, but for all of yours as well.’” —Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

“I love Brenda Miller’s Love You, Bye. I follow her through the surprises of caretaking—as unexpected as it often is—then the dying, the grief, and the resurrection of the spirit as if we were sisters, as if I were one of her Threshold Singers at the bedside of her dying father, her beloved dog, and then her mother. There’s an intimacy in this collection, interspersed poems lifting like the multicolored kite Miller installed in her father’s nursing home room. I see into the Jewish rituals from the point of view of an adult Bat Mitzvah. In fact, the poems and stories all have the feel of newness, all this happening for the first time. There’s a freshness in the telling. Life is a surprise.” —Fleda Brown, author of The End of the Clockwork Universe

“Love You, Bye is an extraordinary book. Beautifully written, with an honesty that is both sensitive and searching, it is an elegy and praise song for Miller’s late parents and a remarkable self-portrait of a ‘wayward daughter’ who has come into the capacious heart of her fullness. A sister ‘wayward’ girl, I was often in tears as I read, recalling my own losses, yet glad to be reminded that ‘to die is not to disappear but to be present in ways our earthly selves could never imagine.’ To read this elegant book is to be transformed by its wisdom and beauty.” —Alison Townsend, author of The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home

“‘You might return someday. Who knows / what will lure you back to that seared / edge between here and there,’ writes Brenda Miller in her new multi-genre wonder, Love You, Bye. Anyone who has ever read Miller's work knows this lure: the tender precision of her language, her relentless innovations with form, and her attention to details others would likely overlook. Maybe you're new to Miller's work, so you haven't been ‘lured back’ yet. Or maybe you're like me, and you've been reading Miller's work for decades. Maybe you opened her debut collection, Season of the Body, when it was published in 2002, and you've been looking at the world a little differently ever since. For you, for us, it's not returning exactly but communing with a trusted companion anew: ‘in a different season, in a different place, [we] continue.’” —Julie Marie Wade, author of Other People's Mothers and Quick Change Artist

“Brenda Miller, originally a poet when I met her, was by then already leading the charge to carve a space for literary creative nonfiction for what would come to be called hybrid: lyric essays, hermit crab essay, collaborations. Her work has meant so much to the creative nonfiction community and especially to me, so it’s fascinating to find her work return to its roots in Love You, Bye in poems, essays, and hybrids of the two, all of it with her fine attention to language, all of it singing. This collection is ‘practicing missing,’ voicing our love and connection to each other in our moments of letting go—whether on the phone, or as buses or cars pull away, or in final goodbyes—staged in the white space of the page, which echoes the phone line fallen silent, the sudden void of death. For all the sites of rupture—families, health, climate, the social contract—there is also still ‘Singing at the Threshold,’ because as she observes, ‘It’s all we want in the end, isn’t it? Love shepherding us into the unknown.’” —Heidi Czerwiec, author of Crafting the Lyric Essay and Fluid States

“Brenda Miller’s Love You, Bye was difficult to put down. Like a hiker in a breathtaking landscape, I always found myself wanting to see what view was around the next bend. Sometimes a single line of verse would bring me to a stop to contemplate its implications and insight. Yet I read the whole book in two days: one evening, one morning. The themes of grief, the slow loss of parents, singing to the dying in hospice, touched both my personal life and my forty-five years of congregational ministry. The spiritual reflections put wings on personal stories and invited a more universal vantage. A very fine read!” —Mark Belletini, author of Nothing Gold Can Stay: The Colors of Grief and Sonata for Voice and Silence