Meghan O'Rourke is the author of The Long Goodbye and the poetry collections Halflife and Once, which, like The Long Goodbye, touches on grief and the strange currents of loss. A former editor at The New Yorker, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. She was awarded the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism. A graduate of Yale University, she has taught at Princeton, The New School, and New York University. She lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up, and Marfa, TX. Here's a dialogue about grief she did with Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/weekinreview/27grief.html