Stay Here with Me

Novelist Robert Olmstead journeys back to his youth on his grandfather’s New Hampshire dairy farm to confront the ghosts that continue to afflict him in this coming-of-age memoir.

Robert Olmstead has peopled his fiction with the rough-hewn farmers, loggers, and hired hands of rural New England mountain towns where getting drunk, getting into fights, and getting thrown out of bars are the normal rites of passage. In Stay Here with Me, Olmstead lays bare the acute pain of his father’s alcoholism and the decline of his grandfather, the family patriarch. With delicate sensuality, he also traces the flowering of his first love for a woman who “walks like light would walk if it could.”

Authentic, intimate, and intense, Stay Here with Me is about growing up and leaving home and about the acts of rebellion that free the body even as they bind the soul to a place forever.

This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by novelist and essayist, Brock Clarke.

Praise for Stay Here with Me

“Written with great-hearted love and compassion in a language full of human longing and frailty, this is a book for anyone who was once young." —Kirkus Reviews

“Stay Here with Me is an illuminating and impassioned meditation on love, friendship, family, and death—everything that makes the past worth remembering and cherishing.”  —John Dufresne, author of No Regrets, Coyote

“Robert Olmstead offers us one brief, acutely remembered summer between his childhood and young adulthood. His eye and heart are tough and quietly, exquisitely, tender. This is a smart, moving, and beautifully written memoir.” —Meredith Hall, author of Beneficence

“A novelist’s sometimes lyrical, sometimes taut reminiscences of the summer of 1972 read very much like an appealing, slightly old-fashioned coming-of-age novel . . . quietly moving.” —Publishers Weekly

“From the soul-embracing experience of sitting on a mountaintop, to the physical and emotional specialness of first love, to the never-to-be-gotten-over effects of an alcoholic father, Olmstead tests his memory, and the findings are exceptionally poignant.” —Booklist