Publication Date: July 30, 2024
What happens when you are forced to let go of the things you love the most? What are you left with?
In her stunning debut short story collection, The Goodbye Process, Mary Jones uses her distinctive voice to examine the painful and sometimes surreal ways we say goodbye.
The stories—which range from tender and heartbreaking to unsettling and darkly funny—will push you out of your comfort zone and ignite intense emotions surrounding love and loss. A woman camps out on the porch of an ex-lover who has barricaded himself inside the house; a preteen girl caught shoplifting finds herself in grave danger; a Los Angeles real estate agent falls for a woman who helps him detach from years of dramatic plastic surgery; a man hires a professional mourner to ensure his wife’s funeral is a success. Again and again, Jones’s characters find themselves facing the ends of things: relationships, health, and innocence.
Arresting, original, and beautifully rendered, this story collection packs a punch, just the way grief does―knocking us off our feet.
With all the different ways to say goodbye, author Mary Jones compiles a variety of short stories in The Goodbye Process.
Whether it’s the collapse of a marriage, a farewell between two childhood friends, or a person’s last breath, the process of communicating the end differs.
The author uses a diverse set of stories from different perspectives, delivering close to 30 examples. Some are more light-hearted than others, but they all pack a sense of unpredictability.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with the author’s writing style, the collection of stories didn’t seem as cohesive as I’d expected.
The Goodbye Process delivers selections focusing on love and loss through a variety of characters.
Mary Jones’s stories and essays have appeared in many journals including Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Subtropics, EPOCH, Alaska Quarterly Review, Columbia Journal, The Hopkins Review, Gay Mag, The Normal School, Epiphany, Santa Monica Review, Brevity and elsewhere. The recipient of a summer prose fellowship from The University of Arizona Poetry Center, her work has been cited as notable in The Best American Essays and appeared in The Best Microfiction 2022. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and teaches fiction writing at UCLA Extension. Originally from Upstate New York, she lives in Los Angeles.
