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Love You, Bye

A Daughter's Journey in Essays and Poems

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Love You, Bye

By: Brenda Miller
Narrated by: Marissa Clay
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A luminous collection of essays and poems about family, faith, and the art of saying goodbye from award-winning essayist, poet, and teacher Brenda Miller.

In Love You, Bye, award-winning author Brenda Miller maps the territory of caregiving, loss, and unexpected grace. The title—drawn from the simple phrase she and her mother said to each other for years—captures the bittersweet essence of a book that finds profound meaning in the most ordinary expressions of love.

At the center of this collection lies the story of Miller's journey as the "wayward daughter" who becomes the devoted caregiver to her aging parents, chronicling her father's gradual decline and her mother's final months with remarkable vulnerability. From the rituals of Passover to the silence of hospice rooms, from the mysterious appearances of tree frogs to the sacred work of singing at deathbeds, Miller weaves together the ordinary and the transcendent, often finding that the sacred is embedded in the mundane.

Miller's voice moves seamlessly between prose and poetry, between humor and heartbreak, between the personal and the universal. She transforms the simple act of saying goodbye into an art form and the everyday language of love into something approaching prayer. Love You, Bye is essential reading for anyone navigating the complexities of aging parents, the mysteries of faith, or the simple courage required to keep loving in a world that can break our hearts.

©2026 Skinner House Books (P)2026 Skinner House Books
Death, Grief & Loss Poetry Themes & Styles
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Critic reviews

“In these radiant meditations on family, Brenda Miller moves through a lifetime of separation, regret, and hurt to find surprising redemption in caring for her aging parents. This collection is a prism of fondness.”—Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, author of Writing the Sacred Journey, Living Revision, and The Release

“Like light from a stained-glass window, this poignant reflection on daughterhood restores wonder to everything it touches. Miller sets her disparate shards of memory side by side, offering poems and lyric essays with a candid, generous hand until a shimmering portrait of hard-won adulthood emerges. Love You, Bye honors not only her beloved parents but the world as they taught her to observe it, with keen, unflinching, and joyous attention.”—Marjorie Sandor, author of Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime

“Approach this book not as your typical collection of essays and poems, but as a jar of bright beads, cohesively combined yet individually shimmering as they catch the tender reflected light of their subjects: Miller’s aging parents foremost, as well as Miller’s own many stored selves from childhood to early old age. Long admired as an essayist of stunning invention and sensitivity, Miller had me nearly in tears from the outset and wouldn’t let me catch my shaky breath until the very last.”—Robin Hemley, author of How to Change History: A Salvage Project

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