The Last Goldfish: A True Tale of Friendship

(Paperback)

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Description

Description for salespeople/selling points

• This memoir will appeal to readers looking for honest depictions of female friendship, illness, and grief.
• Widely published author whose work has appeared in various anthologies, Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, The Walrus, and numerous other national Canadian publications.
• Potential for interest from academic market as a women's studies course reading.
• Potential for interest from women's book clubs
• Booksellers familiar with Lahey's previous books, including The Mystery Shopping Cart, Spinning Side Kick, and Out to Dry in Cape Breton, will be anticipating this newest addition.

Reviews

Praise for The Last Goldfish

Anita Lahey writes about friendship and loss with nimbleness and grace. Her memoir brings back to life what illness and death took away.Elizabeth Hay, author of All Things Consoled: A Daughters Memoir

For all who secretly understand that friends are family comes Anita Laheys heartwrencher, The Last Goldfish . . . Journalist-poet Laheys sublimely empathic eye and piquant sense of humour, especially in matters of love and death, make this a gentle, generous, and stunning book. Youll remember these brave friends.Molly Peacock , author of The Paper Garden and The Analyst

Lahey creates two teenage girls with such novelistic skill that youre instantly pulled into their lives and back to adolescence itself, the exuberance and intensity . . . This book is true in the way a carpenter uses the word, for an oak plank that is perfectly and exquisitely honed, and will bear the weight.Joan Thomas, author of Five Wives

Lahey is a writer of extraordinary gifts, evoking the world of two raucous schoolgirls growing up in the 1980s in astonishing, at times laugh-out-loud funny, detail . . . Lou couldnt have asked for a more stalwart, loyal friend than Anita Lahey; we couldnt ask for a more acutely observant and empathetic writer.Moira Farr, author of After Daniel: A Suicide Survivors Tale

Praise for Anita Lahey

Anita Lahey is no slouch. The poems in Out to Dry in Cape Breton quickstep along in snappy, rhythmic lines that display plenty of striking images and a sly sense of humour. In crisp, descriptive phrases, Lahey turns details of ordinary domesticity Everyday rags and wraps, as she puts it into vivid tableaux. . .Out to Dry in Cape Breton is a real footstomper, finely crafted and full of verve.Toronto Star

Nothing feels extraneous here and Lahey never plays fast and loose with her words. Her precision, instead of constricting, allows verbal quirks to shine without being precious.The Dominion

Anita Laheys Out to Dry in Cape Breton is one of the best Canadian poetry debuts Ive read in a while. Her poems are vividly imagined, technically and formally astute, and stylistically rich. . . Lahey seems to invite our imaginations to be suspended out on the (clothes)lines of her poems. Go willingly.PoetryReviews.ca

Who would have thought that brilliant poetry could use hanging out laundry as a focus . . . The poems are self-deprecating, often hilariously so . . . a first-rate book. Lahey may not be able to jig mackerel, but she can write a poem with consummate skill.Montreal Review of Books

Laheypersonable, emotive and stylistically wittymakes her home, fearlessly on the line. . . Melancholic yet entertaining, Lahey is a poet who gets her verve and energy from those wind-whipped tangles of feeling. Every time she walked out, willing, onto the line, she led so confidently that I was ready to follow.Books in Canada

The action in the opening sequence. . . is contagious and spreads through the rest of the book. The poets playful approach to figuration, as in the personification of Hurricane Bill, brings out the humour in her conceptual analogies. Lahey enlivens her economical commentary, at times verging on dramatic monologue and laced with comic irony, by her ability to mimic voices. . .and with high density sound-play.University of Toronto Quarterly

The book of my dreams. . .The Mystery Shopping Cart was a perfect antidote to February, as well as to bookstore closures and general dissatisfaction with the state of the world. Because here is a book that testifies that words, books and ideas matter. Here is a smart and generous voice that takes the reader into its fold. . .This is that kind of book, the kind that takes you places. The kind with essays about poetry that I read anyway, though I am not a poet myself, or a confident reader of them. These are essays about poets Ive never heard of, poets that Ive never read, and I read these essays anyway. They presume that I should care about these things, invite me to do so, and I do. I am welcomed into the conversation, rather than alienated from it (by jargon, theory, grudges and biases Im not privy to)."Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This

"Laheys essay on eulogies is worth the price of admission, and one of best things in the book. . .Lahey packs into thirty-odd pages a books-worth of grief and epiphany without the schmaltz of most death-themed nonfiction. Its a testament to her capability with the personal essay that she can turn writing about the eulogy, a form she confesses is sappy, incomplete and awkward, dripping love and exaggeration, into something as deeply felt and engaging as this piece was. Lahey brings to these essays the same honesty, directness and curiosity she brings to her criticism.Maisonneuve

Author Bio

Anita Lahey's books include The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry and Culture and two Vhicule Press poetry collections: Spinning Side Kick and Out to Dry in Cape Breton. Anita is an award-winning magazine journalist, past editor of Arc Poetry Magazine, and serves as series editor of the annual anthology, Best Canadian Poetry. A former resident of Toronto, Montreal, Fredericton and Victoria, she maintains fierce familial ties to Cape Breton Island and lives in Ottawa with her family. She grew up in Burlington, Ontario, in a house with a huge backyard a short bike ride from Lake Ontario.