release date: 19 july 2010

“Deep, dark, and beautiful, Christie Hodgen’s story of a fabulously flawed family reads like a quintessentially American tale.... The generational cast of quirky, yet completely believable characters, the heartbreak and redemption as time unfolds, and Hodgen’s biting humor and exquisite writing all add up to a tremendous novel. Book clubs: put this one on your lists.” — Lolly Winston, author of Happiness Sold Separately

“Elegies for the Brokenhearted is brilliant, gorgeous, illuminated writing. Hodgen writes like a Christian mystic who has God speaking through her mingled with her own wild, lyrical mix of popular culture and high art. What a voice!” — Clancy Martin, author of How to Sell

“This stellar novel shows us once again that Christie Hodgen is hilarious, hugely talented, and full of luminous passion. In inspired prose, she tells the stories of those who have strung themselves around the heart of Mary Murphy, that undefeated heroine who cannot stop speaking to her loved ones, long after they’ve left.” — Deb Olin Unferth, author of Vacation

“Knocked my socks off. It’s a first-person novel told in second-person looks back at five significant people she’s lost: a life told in deaths. Hodgen’s writing spins out dependent clauses like carefully controlled ripples of language.” — Caroline Stanley, Flavorwire

elegies for the brokenhearted, w.w. norton & co., july 2010

A savvy, spirited, moving, and surprisingly humorous novel in elegies.

A skirt-chasing, car-racing uncle with whiskey breath and a three-day beard. A “walking joke, a sitting duck, a fish in a barrel” named Elwood LePoer.  A dirt-poor college roommate who conceals an unbearable secret. A failed piano prodigy lost in middle age. A beautiful mother haunted by her once-great aspirations.

In Elegies for the Brokenhearted, Mary Murphy tells her own story as she paints lively portraits of the people with whom she’s crossed paths. Having weathered her mother’s erratic movement among homes and multiple husbands, the absence of her runaway sister, and a discouraging search for purpose, Mary’s reflection on her own path intertwines with the histories of the people she’s loved and lost. With a rhythmically unique voice and distinctive wry humor, Christie Hodgen builds an unconventional narrative about the difficult search for identity, belonging, and family.

“Comprising five elegies, Hodgen’s absorbing novel pulls readers into the life of Mary Murphy, who has,

along with her older sister, Malinda, endured her mother’s five marriages with a silent stoicism. Mary’s

uncle Mike is the idol of her youth and a semi-permanent male presence, despite being “the chump, the

slouch, the drunk, the bum” of the family, until he takes off for New York City and dies of an overdose. A

schoolmate’s refusal to give Mary and her family a ride results in her mother meeting her fourth husband,

an African American who draws Mary out of her shell and becomes a real father. A college roommate then

shows her the impossibility of ever leaving family behind. After she graduates, Mary mounts a search for

her runaway sister and ends up living a routine existence in a small town in Maine, her only friends a gay

pianist and an older German woman, each paralyzed by their past promise. At the heart of the longing that

propels Mary is her vivacious, feckless mother whose quest for an identity has shaped Mary’s own.

Hodgen’s magnificent, heartbreaking journey with its moving finish is an unforgettable novel, a must-read.”

                                                                                                                             ~ Booklist (starred review)

“Pushcart Prize–winner Hodgen (Hello, I Must Be Going) builds a stunning melancholic portrait of damaged Mary Murphy in five elegies for people whose tawdry lives have shaped her own. The taciturn protagonist, growing up in a dying industrial town in the 1980s, is dragged from home to home as her beautiful mother serially marries and treats Mary and her sister, Malinda, like so much luggage. In Mary's wrenching and unflinching voice, we hear stories of people who eventually abandon her: her mother's deadbeat brother, Mike, who drives the girls to school in a muscle car named Michelle and disappears one day without a word; Mary's pathetic schoolmate, Elwood LePoer, who inadvertently connects Mary's family with a father figure and who pays a stiff price for a naïve act of trust; James Butler, a failed gay composer who Mary believes will connect her with her long-lost sister, and finally, her mother, who serves as the book's selfish, deluded heart of darkness. Each elegy is a riveting trip into dark and essentially humorless territory made especially worthwhile by Hodgen's gorgeous prose.“

                                                                                                                        ~ Publishers Weekly (starred review)