The Slow Road North is a clear-eyed, warm-hearted, tender story of how to contend with grief and open yourself up to healing. Rosie Schaap writes with delicacy and grace and humor, and it is a pleasure to spend time in the company of her words.” — JAMI ATTENBERG, New York Times bestselling author of I Came All This Way to Meet You
“The Slow Road North by Rosie Schaap is a meditation on loss and longing. It is a beautifully written meander through the byways of grief both personal and communal that begins in sadness and ends in acceptance, hope, and (dare I say it) quiet joy.” — JESSICA B. HARRIS, author of My Soul Looks Back: A Memoir and High on the Hog
“Sharp as a pencil, witty as a friend, and wounding as a lover, Rosie Schaap’s The Slow Road North is a mature and searching exploration of what it means to leave, lose, love, arrive, and heal. It’s also a necessary contribution to the stack of books that render Northern Ireland, site of so much suffering and resistance, with intimacy and nuance.” — EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG, author of Housemates and The Third Rainbow Girl
"The Slow Road North is for anyone who has ever felt like a fossil preserved in amber after losing a loved one, stuck and isolated. Rosie Schaap’s exquisite memoir about uprooting her life in Brooklyn and finding another home in Northern Ireland is written with her signature sagacious warmth. As the author immerses herself in her newfound community, she captures the nuances of life in a small village and discovers that grief isn’t something to be moved through alone.” — MICHELE FILGATE, editor of What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About
"A necessary journey through grief and recovery, lush and lyrical as a walk in the woods." — SARAH GERARD, author of Sunshine State and Carrie Carolyn Coco?
"Rosie Schaap's gorgeous The Slow Road North is filled with the warmth, compassion, and inviting spirit that always infuse her writing, even as she reveals how little of that same care and generosity she extended to herself following the death of her husband, her mom, and her cat. In Glenarm, at last, she grieves. With its craic and woodlands, its robins and fairies, its approach to death and its history of trouble, the village offers her a safe place to sit with her lossesand prepares her for the love and wonder to follow." — MAUD NEWTON, author of Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
"Rosie Schaap is my ideal combination of earthy and erudite. The wolves of grief, regret, and guilt have chased her, as they chase all of us at some point, and she shows us here, with humor and deep-thumping heart, that it's possible not only to stop running from them, but to invite them in for a cup of tea, or a pint.: — NINA MACLAUGHLIN, author of Wake, Siren
"A poignant and moving memoir featuring a well-rendered story of pain and redemption." — Kirkus Reviews
"Schaap marries a reporter’s curiosity with a humorist’s eye for detail… A nuanced and poignant account of what comes after grief." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
2024-05-15
A Northern Ireland–based journalist and nonfiction writer reflects on the loss and grief that changed her life.
When New York City native Schaap, author of Drinking With Men, went to read a favorite poem to her cancer-stricken husband, Frank, on Valentine’s Day 2010, she did not know it would be the last time she would see him alive. The day afterward, he passed away while she was temporarily absent from his side. Flattened by grief and guilt, she ran away from the pain, visiting a city, Belfast, in a country she had loved during her student days in Dublin. From that point on, Northern Ireland—its rugged beauty, tortured but fascinating history, and quirky inhabitants—became her beacon of hope as she navigated new widowhood and more wounding deaths. Several trips to Ireland later and nearly a decade after Frank’s death, Schaap took a chance on the impractical-seeming dream of pursuing a creative writing master’s degree in Belfast. Immediately, her life opened her to new vistas: first, graduate school, and then pandemic lockdown with a sculptor whom she had met on her first trip to Belfast and eventually married. Though Jewish and a foreigner, the author quickly found her place in a world that surprised her with its openness and its willingness to move past a history of sectarian violence. Most unexpectedly of all, though, was the solace and profound understanding of grief she gained by interacting with people willing to share their own stories of loss. Death was never fair in what it took away; however, to recall with gratitude what was lost could ease suffering and even touch wellsprings of the deepest joy. As Schaap writes, “To love is to remember; to remember is to keep loving.”
A poignant and moving memoir featuring a well-rendered story of pain and redemption.