Life After Life (McCorkle)

Life After Life
Jill McCorkle, 2013
Algonquin of Chapel Hill
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781565122550


Summary
Award-winning author Jill McCorkle takes us on a splendid journey through time and memory in this, her tenth work of fiction.

Life After Life is filled with a sense of wonder at our capacity for self-discovery at any age. And the residents, staff, and neighbors of the Pine Haven retirement center (from twelve-year-old Abby to eighty-five-year-old Sadie) share some of life’s most profound discoveries and are some of the most true-to-life characters that you are ever likely to meet in fiction.

—There’s retired third-grade teacher Sadie Randolph, who has taught every child in town and believes we are all eight years old in our hearts;

—Stanley Stone, a prominent lawyer, now feigning dementia to escape life with his son;

—Marge Walker, the town’s self-appointed conveyor of social status, who keeps a scrapbook of every local murder and heinous crime;

—Rachel Silverman, recently widowed, whose decision to leave her Massachusetts home and settle at Pine Haven is a puzzle to everyone but her;

—C.J., the pierced and tattooed young mother who runs the beauty shop;

—Joanna Lamb, the hospice volunteer who discovers that her path to a good life lies in helping people achieve good deaths.

As each character begins to connect with another, the mysteries and consequences of their lives are revealed. What they eventually learn about themselves and one another will profoundly transform them all.

Delivered with her trademark wit, Jill ?McCorkle’s constantly surprising novel illuminates the possibilities of second chances, hope, and rediscovering life right up to the very end. With Life After Life, she has conjured up an ?entire community that reminds all of us that grace and magic can—and do—appear when we least expect it. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 7, 1958
• Where—Lumberton, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina; M.A., Hollins College.
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Hillsborourgh, North Carolina

Jill Collins McCorkle is an American short story writer and novelist. She graduated from University of North Carolina, in 1980, where she studied with Max Steele, Lee Smith, and Louis D. Rubin. She obtained her M.A. from Hollins College.

Novels
McCorkle has the distinction of having her first two novels published on the same day in 1984. Of these novels, the New York Times Book Review said, “One suspects the author of The Cheer Leader is a born novelist, with July 7th, she is also a full grown one.”

Since then she has published several other novels—including Life After Life (2013) and Hieroglyphics (2020). Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books

Stories
McCorkle has also published four collections of short stories, out of which four stories have been tapped for Best American Short Stories and several collected in New Stories from the South. Her short stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Southern Review, Narrative Magazine and American Scholar among others.

Her story “Intervention” is included in the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.  An essay, “Cuss Time,” originally published in American Scholar was selected for Best American Essays. Other essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, Southern Living, Our State, Allure and Real Simple.

Teaching
McCorkle has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Tufts, and Brandeis where she was the Fannie Hurst Visiting Writer. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard for five years where she also chaired Creative Writing.

Currently,  McCorkle teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at NC State University and is a core faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She is a frequent instructor in the Sewanee Summer Writers Program and a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Awards
New England Booksellers Award
John Dos  Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature
North Carolina Award for Literature

McCorckle lives with her husband, photographer Tom Rankin, in Hillsborough, NC.  (Adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website.)

Book Reviews
McCorkle...look[s] at the regrets that haunt the end of a life. [The book's] saddest and most unlovable characters are her most compelling.… McCorkle [is] interested in capturing moments that ring true than in providing closure.
Publishers Weekly


It takes a skillful author to write a book about death that leaves the reader feeling uplifted, and McCorkle is such an author. [This] multilayered… excellent novel [is] unusual in its shifting construction. —Shaunna E. Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA
Library Journal


Assisted living residents and a hospice worker confront the inevitable with grit and humor. A potentially cliched unifying device,… [any] predictability is dispelled by the jaw-dropping ending. McCorkle's masterful microcosm invokes profound sadness, harsh insight and guffaws, often on the same page.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
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