In 2007, when Alex Matthews was 19, her mother committed suicide.
A love letter to Janet Fitch\'s White Oleander and Joan Didion\'s A Year of Magical Thinking , Lonely Spires is written with a lyrical voice that sways between prose and poetry while never flinching from the difficult emotions that come from grief and the weighty bond between a mother and a daughter..
It will be her final penance for disappearing while she fought through the raging sea of her grief to break a cycle set in motion generations before her.
In it, she explains why she left, where she was through those five years, and, most importantly, why she kept their daughter from him.
In 2018, now married to Marc, Alex writes a letter pouring out the guilt and regret she\'s been holding onto for nearly two decades.
It was only after five years of self-imposed exile that she returned to Port Aransas no longer with Jonathan, but with a four year old daughter.
Lost to the dark waters of her own self-destruction, she found solace not in her boyfriend Marc, but in her professor, Jonathan, who she followed to Austin without telling anyone.
Adrift in her grief, Alex pulled away from her brothers\' attempts to keep the family together.
In 2007, when Alex Matthews was 19, her mother committed suicide