Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter's Memoir of Love After Loss

"Romeo's honest, hopeful story will strike a meaningful chord with those who've been prompted to reconsider their relationships or themselves after a death."--Publisher's Weekly

This memoir spans but a few years in Ms. Romeo's late forties, though of course looks back. Her elderly father, living comfortably in Las Vegas with her mother, falls ill. He develops disabling arthritis, Alzheimer's, and then has a stroke. Getting old, as has been said, is not for the faint of heart... Grief, as the author tells us, is not about forgetting. It is about remembering. The treatment for grief, particularly persistent or unresolved grief, is conjuring up memories, unearthing the past, with its kaleidoscope of emotions. Only then can the heartache be mitigated, a lost and pained relationship be mended, a life propelled forward.

That is where this memoir ends. Not quite "all's well that ends well." The author knows life too well for that. But her grief and her father's visits (which fade and then maybe vanish for her) are mutative. She has changed in ways that heighten her attachments and her kindness to others and herself. As her father used to say, "you did good, kid."

--New York Journal of Books
...this book shatters grief myths to expose bereavement experiences that often go unacknowledged within American life... Romeo's ruminations amplify the emotional complexities of early mourning, when there is no rulebook or how-to manual for how to get this right, despite American culture's insistence on five tidy consecutive stages of grief...In American culture, where talk of death is still taboo, we need more stories about the aftermath of loss, about what it means to live with candor in the face of grief. We need stories that speak with frankness about parental death. We need writers like Romeo to start a new conversation, to keep it going." --Brevity
"Romeo's reflections on death and complicated parental relationships gesture towards a larger understanding with which any human can empathize." --Hippocampus Magazine
"Lisa Romeo has constructed a provocative look at the grieving process, unstinting in self-examination, authentic in its exploration of complex family relationships, and, at its most basic level, a tender eulogy about the father she has lost."--Literary Mama
"She opens up her heart to her father, her family, the reader and herself. She writes that the act of creating this memoir was, in part, to know her father better. In doing so, it's clear to readers that she has also come to know herself better. And this is a story any of us having experienced loss can take comfort in."--Halfway Down the Stairs
"Starting with Goodbye produces the fading image of a whole generation of Italian American old timers, loaf of Italian bread in hand, skillfully playing on the reader's heart strings."--Ovunque Siamo