Stay Here with Me: A Memoir

Novelist Robert Olmstead journeys back to his youth on his grandfather’s New Hampshire dairy farm to confront the ghosts that continue to afflict him in this coming-of-age memoir. Robert Olmstead has peopled his fiction with the rough-hewn farmers, loggers, and hired hands of rural New England mountain towns where getting drunk, getting into fights, and getting thrown out of bars are the normal rites of passage. In Stay Here with Me, Olmstead lays bare the acute pain of his father’s alcoholism and the decline of his grandfather, the family patriarch. With delicate sensuality, he also traces the flowering of his first love for a woman who “walks like light would walk if it could.” Authentic, intimate, and intense, Stay Here with Me is about growing up and leaving home and about the acts of rebellion that free the body even as they bind the soul to a place forever. This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by novelist and essayist, Brock Clarke.