Coming April 2020
Twenty-five years ago and counting, Louisa, my true, essential, always-there-for-everything friend, died. We were 22.
When Anita Lahey opens her binder in grade nine French and gasps over an unsigned form, the girl with the burst of red hair in front of her whispers, Forge it! Thus begins an intense, joyful friendship, one of those powerful bonds forged in youth that shapes a person’s identity and changes the course of a life.
Anita and Louisa navigate the wilds of 1980s suburban adolescence against the backdrop of dramatic world events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. They make carpe diem their manifesto and hatch ambitious plans. But when Louisa’s life takes a shocking turn, into hospital wards, medical tests, and treatments, a new possibility confronts them, one that alters, with devastating finality, the prospect of the future for them both.
Equal parts humorous and heartbreaking, The Last Goldfish is a poignant memoir of youth, friendship, and the impermanence of life.
What readers are saying about The Last Goldfish
“The Last Goldfish is a gorgeously written coming-of-age tale with a heartbreaking twist. Lahey is a writer of extraordinary gifts, evoking the world of two raucous schoolgirls growing up in 1980s Burlington, Ontario in astonishing, at times laugh-out-loud funny, detail. Anita and her best friend Lou are intensely alive in these pages, squeezing every last drop out of existence, learning the most painful and profound life lessons, together and alone, as cancer cruelly hijacks their youth. Lou couldn’t have asked for a more stalwart, loyal friend than Anita Lahey; we couldn’t ask for a more acutely observant and empathetic writer to takes us along as she explores every nook and cranny of the life and early death of her best friend.”
—Moira Farr
“Anita Lahey writes about friendship and loss with nimbleness and grace. Her memoir brings back to life what illness and death took away.”
—Elizabeth Hay, author of All Things Consoled: a daughter’s memoir
“The Last Goldfish feels true in every sense of the word. Not just that all this really happened. Not just that author Anita Lahey creates two teenage girls with such novelistic skill that you’re instantly pulled into their lives and back to adolescence itself, the exuberance and intensity. But mainly this book is true in the way a carpenter uses the word, for an oak plank that is perfectly and exquisitely honed, and will bear the weight.”
—Joan Thomas, author of Five Wives
“For all who secretly understand that friends are family comes Anita Lahey’s heartwrencher, The Last Goldfish, a memoir of a quirky redhead and a stubborn brunette. As these two girls are becoming young women, illness pushes the valiant redhead onto a harrowing path. Of course the stalwart brunette accompanies her. Warning: you’ll cry. (I certainly did.) One dies. One lives to tell this tale. Journalist-poet Anita Lahey’s sublimely empathic eye and piquant sense of humor, especially in matters of love and death, make The Last Goldfish a gentle, generous, and stunning book. You’ll remember these brave friends.”
—Molly Peacock, author of The Paper Garden and The Analyst
Lovely poem! Favourite lines: “her Cyrano de Bergerac/snout, over her lumpy coronet” and “grasp at a willowy stalk, and pivot…
Thank you, Alice! I loved it too. And it comes to mind often, which is not common, even for books…
I loved this book, Anita, and thoroughly enjoyed reading your thoughts and insights about it. Thank you!
Thank you Maureen! I greatly appreciate your comment. And yes, I too, was thinking about the translation & how well…
Fiona, thank you. It is not lost on me that you have a seahorse poem I love. Maureen Hynes reminded…