Eric LeMays The First 649 Days is a work of breathtaking honesty and heart. LeMay captures lifes singular momentsthe birth of a child, unexpected illness, mortalityexquisitely, revealing the precarious beauty of our world through the eyes of his young son Ro. LeMays inventive renderings are a brilliant reminder that our lives may harbor threat, disappointment, and grief, yet still shimmer with hope and wild beauty at every turn.Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire
How to describe a book as so profoundly human as The First 649 Days? LeMays archive of parenthood during a global pandemic reckons with many of lifes heavier subjectsillness and mortality, anxiety about the future, the ever-present threat of gun violencewoven into the fabric of the small moments that, taken together, comprise the whole of our lives: bringing a newborn baby home, long walks in the Appalachian wilds, conversations over spoonfuls of sherbet. The essays in The First 649 Days are a celebration of love and its resilience in the face of unthinkable circumstances and a resonant contemporary record of our time. Zoë Bossiere, author of Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir
The First 649 Days is worth its weight in gold, mined responsibly from the veins of Eric LeMays heart. In its shine you may find yours. Perhaps youll meet the parent you want to be or give voice to your silenced inner Hamlet. You may awaken with him at Fox Lake to the bodys vulnerability or warm with gratitude for those nurses who can gentle terror. Certainly, this private reckoning invites communion, as the birds commune over feasts of seeds he presents as poetry on paper altars. How do you want to be remembered? we ask alongside him and, for his considerations, answer wiser.Amy Wright, author of Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round
