The Last Year: Essays by Jill Talbot
Awarded the Wandering Aengus Editor's Prize in Nonfiction
In The Last Year, Jill Talbot achieves that rare magic that can exist in the finest examples of the essay form: she captures the ecstatic, mysterious fullness of life in each moment. These missives are about so many things — parenthood, grief, fear, pain, joy, art. Every sentence carries the weight of the past, the breathless potential of the future. Every detail is loaded with honesty, introspection, and, above all else, care. To read it, to bear witness to this mother/daughter relationship as Talbot stands on the precipice of enormous change, is a gift.
— Lucas Mann, Author of Captive Audience and Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances
In The Last Year, Jill Talbot turns the small things sacred, distilling the quiet moments between a mother and daughter into something veering toward revelation. Each page reminds us that the greatest dramas of our lives often go unnoticed—unless we do the noticing. Part epiphany, part elegy, all love. This book is a small mercy. Its gift is grace.
— B.J. Hollars, Author of Go West, Young Man: A Father and Son Rediscover America on the Oregon Trail
The moments that change us, the ghosts that follow us, the memories that slow us down or keep us afloat – Jill Talbot has found the language for all of that. This is a book about the in-between time, when we look back at multiple beginnings as we brace for the good-bye. Talbot, a longtime single mother, hopes she was enough as she prepares to launch her daughter into the world. Anyone who has ever loved a child will recognize themselves in her mirror. I didn’t want this book to end.
-- Connie Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Daughters of Erietown
Jill Talbot’s The Last Year is an evocative and heart wrenching portrait of her final days living with her daughter, Indie, who’s about to leave home for university – just as the world begins to shut down in the face of the Covid19 pandemic. With penetrating insight and raw honesty, Talbot explores the lingering absent presence of the relationships that shape our lives, from former lovers to deceased parents, as she questions ‘What happens after an ending?’ Across a series of deftly crafted essays Talbot’s prose draws lasting images of a precarious life of her and her daughter on the road as they relocate from one short term academic posting to another. Talbot proves to be a great American chronicler, like the passing moments of life caught by the Leica of beat photographer Robert Frank in The Americans, The Last Year elevates fleeting and ephemeral moments, a favourite booth in a bar, a view from a front doorstep, an empty flat left behind, to a profound view of what makes us who we are.
— Felicity Jones, Actress and Producer
— Lucas Mann, Author of Captive Audience and Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances
In The Last Year, Jill Talbot turns the small things sacred, distilling the quiet moments between a mother and daughter into something veering toward revelation. Each page reminds us that the greatest dramas of our lives often go unnoticed—unless we do the noticing. Part epiphany, part elegy, all love. This book is a small mercy. Its gift is grace.
— B.J. Hollars, Author of Go West, Young Man: A Father and Son Rediscover America on the Oregon Trail
The moments that change us, the ghosts that follow us, the memories that slow us down or keep us afloat – Jill Talbot has found the language for all of that. This is a book about the in-between time, when we look back at multiple beginnings as we brace for the good-bye. Talbot, a longtime single mother, hopes she was enough as she prepares to launch her daughter into the world. Anyone who has ever loved a child will recognize themselves in her mirror. I didn’t want this book to end.
-- Connie Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Daughters of Erietown
Jill Talbot’s The Last Year is an evocative and heart wrenching portrait of her final days living with her daughter, Indie, who’s about to leave home for university – just as the world begins to shut down in the face of the Covid19 pandemic. With penetrating insight and raw honesty, Talbot explores the lingering absent presence of the relationships that shape our lives, from former lovers to deceased parents, as she questions ‘What happens after an ending?’ Across a series of deftly crafted essays Talbot’s prose draws lasting images of a precarious life of her and her daughter on the road as they relocate from one short term academic posting to another. Talbot proves to be a great American chronicler, like the passing moments of life caught by the Leica of beat photographer Robert Frank in The Americans, The Last Year elevates fleeting and ephemeral moments, a favourite booth in a bar, a view from a front doorstep, an empty flat left behind, to a profound view of what makes us who we are.
— Felicity Jones, Actress and Producer
Order The Last Year
Jill Talbot is the winner of The Florida Review’s 2021 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award Winner for her short story collection, A Distant Town, published in Summer 2022. She is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir (Soft Skull) and Loaded: Women and Addiction (Seal Press), the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together (U of Texas Press), and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (Iowa), as well as the forthcoming The Essay Form(s), a craft book that will be published by Columbia University Press in 2023. Her writing has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, The Paris Review Daily, and The Rumpus and has been recognized four times in The Best American Essays. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of North Texas.
jilltalbot.net
jilltalbot.net