Be with Me Always

Essays

by Randon Billings Noble

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Pub Date 1 Mar 2019 | Archive Date 29 Mar 2019

University of Nebraska Press

Biographies & Memoirs | Nonfiction (Adult)

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Description

“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!” Thus does Heathcliff beg his dead Cathy in Wuthering Heights. He wants to be haunted—he insists on it. Randon Billings Noble does too. Instead of exorcising the ghosts of her past, she hopes for their cold hands to knock at the window and to linger. Be with Me Always is a collection of essays that explore hauntedness by considering how the ghosts of our pasts cling to us.

In a way, all good essays are about the things that haunt us until we have somehow embraced or understood them. Here, Noble considers the ways she has been haunted—by a near-death experience, the gaze of a nude model, thoughts of widowhood, Anne Boleyn’s violent death, a book she can’t stop reading, a past lover who shadows her thoughts—in essays both pleasant and bitter, traditional and lyrical, and persistently evocative and unforgettable.

Advance Praise

“In her brilliant collection Be with Me Always, Randon Billings Noble explores the frailty of romance, of the human body, and of us all, with startling honesty, admirable ingenuity, genuine insight, and, always, with energy and surprise.”—Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire

“A marvel. These essays are lyrical and innovative. . . . Dracula is a guide to a first love, Robinson Crusoe carries her through pregnancy with twins, Terry Tempest Williams helps her survive a cancer diagnosis, and E. M. Forster and Facebook help her manage the strange faces at her high school reunion. I admire Noble and her essays very much.”—Ned Stuckey-French, author of The American Essay in the American Century

“How does a body want? How does a body know? And in wanting and in knowing, why does a body refrain from solidifying desire and knowledge? These are the questions that Randon Billings Noble asks in her essays, which cut so deep into the body.”—Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life