The Memory Of Running [Paperback] McLarty, Ron

Smithson Ide is 43, overweight, drunk most nights, and living in his childhood bedroom in Rhode Island. Then his parents die in a car crash, and the cops call to say his schizophrenic sister has been murdered in Los Angeles. Smithy digs his old Raleigh bicycle out of the basement and starts pedaling west — 3,000 miles to claim her body. What begins as a grim errand becomes something else entirely: a reckoning with memory, family, and all the ways we bury ourselves alive. McLarty (better known as an actor) writes with surprising tenderness about grief, mental illness, and the strange redemption found in forward motion. The prose is lean, the observations sharp, and Smithy's voice will stay with you long after you finish. For fans of Kent Haruf or anyone who's ever wanted to ride away from their life and, somehow, back into it.