Rules for Saying Goodbye

By: Katherine Taylor

Narrated by: Katherine Taylor

Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

Kate is having a hard time. Lucas, the journalist she moved to Rome to marry, seems to be breaking up with her. In actual fact, he doesn't want to feel responsible for making her happy. "You were never responsible for that," she answers, confused. "Happiness simply happened between us."

In Kate's world, pleasure and melancholy are close neighbors. Rules for Saying Goodbye follows Kate as she makes the unlikely migration from suburban California to a New England prep school, and then to Manhattan. There, she enjoys a dissipated life of bartending and writing novels, falling in love with the wrong boys, and discussing those boys while smoking borrowed cigarettes on the sofa with her best friend, Clarissa. Her devotedly neurotic mother is desperate for Kate to marry someone, anyone, so she can be sure that someone else will love her daughter after she dies. But Kate has other ideas.

In this witty and affecting debut novel, fiction winks at real life: Katherine Taylor is its muddled heroine, and also its author. Fizzing with intelligence and charm, Rules for Saying Goodbye chronicles that heart-grabbing moment when you stop waiting for things to happen to you and go in search of them yourself.

©2007 Katherine Taylor (P)2007 Books on Tape

Critic reviews

"Taylor is a superb satirist, eviscerating everyone in her Katherine's path. In the middle of the novel she drops a list of 'rules for saying goodbye'; it's extraneous, even precious, and it's the best thing in the book: e.g., 'Once you are gone, be gone for good.' Taylor manages to make worn New York yarns feel fresh again." ( Publishers Weekly)

List Of Rules Is The Best Part Of The Book

I agree with the critics comment that; the list of the rules for saying goodbye is the best part of the book. I did not think that she was a super satirist. I felt she wrote as a self-centered immature young woman. Her insights about her friends and family were less than adequate and embarrassingly immature. Her relationship with her war correspondent boyfriend was horrifyingly self-centered. The narration was adequate, not great; she sounded like a whiney teenager. I should know better than to listen to a book narrated by the author. I just barely made it through to the end of the book.

fun and thoughtful

This book is a delightful experience to read. it's easy yet each word is beautifully chosen by the author to give the reader entertainment with a soul

Tender wry and heartbreaking

This beautifully written book is funny clever and ultimately heartbreaking.
This story is emotionally intelligent.
It is well worth listening all the way to the gentle and devastatingly sad ending.
Katherine’s voice is delicious and clever.