In this collection of essays, Lee Zacharias offers four intimate portraits of people who changed the arc of her life: a boy from her youth who was her hometown's unsuspected living memory; her buoyant, larger-than-life father-in-law; a friend whose early death prompts reflections on his complexities and convictions; and finally, Zacharias’s own younger self, as embodied in the bridal gown she wore for her first wedding. In these portraits, the act of remembering is a celebration, a salute, a making of peace, a hard accounting of the self in a mirror held up by the other, an enthusiastic wave from across a great distance, an assurance that we can all see each other again.

“What a gorgeous book! This quartet of essays ebbs and flows through youth and age, love and loss, death and hope—always with beauty and grace. Thoughtful, poignant, honest, and insightful, Remember Me reminds us how our past loves—family, friends, neighborhoods, landscapes—continually bloom in all of us.”
—RANDON BILLINGS NOBLE, author of Be with Me Always

“An essay is an attempt to make sense of things. By that definition the pieces in Remember Me are essays, but they are also connections: to places and people and the past, how those we have lost tether us to who we are in the present. They are histories: of friends and family, of neighborhoods and neighbors, of how those we love and the places we loved them are as shifting and changing as the seasons. And they are celebrations, of the small moments that carry our memories into the future. These essays are beautiful, like a falling star, something you might never see again.”
—PAUL CRENSHAW, author of Melt with Me

“Just as the four chambers of the heart work together to sustain vital functions, the four essays of Lee Zacharias’s Remember Me contract and relax, robust in their purpose. This collection explores the human condition in all its complexity, leaving the reader understanding something not only about the world but about themselves. Striking details like the ashy flicker of small black-and-white TVs and ten pennies of allowance kept in a custard cup transcend time and distance. In the second essay, “Crossing the River,” Zacharias asserts to name something is to stake a claim. Indeed, Remember Me does just that: it grabs hold of your heart and invites it to concurrently burgeon and rest.
—CHARLOTTE MATTHEWS, author of Comes With Furniture and People

LEE ZACHARIAS is the author of one previous collection of essays, The Only Sounds We Make, four novels, and a collection of short stories. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her work has received the Phillip H. McMath Book Award and the North Carolina Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, as well as recognition from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her first novel, Lessons, was a featured Book of the Month Club selection, and the Library of Michigan chose her third novel, Across the Great Lake, as a 2019 Notable Michigan Book.

Her novels have also been honored as distinguished favorites or finalists by the International Book Awards, New York City Big Book Awards, Pinnacle Book Achievement Awards, American Fiction Awards, USA Book Awards, National Indie Excellence Awards, the Omaha Book Prize, the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, and the Indies Foreword Awards.

Nearly all of her nonfiction (including the four essays collected here) has been cited in the annual Best American Essays, which reprinted her essay “Buzzards” in the 2008 collection. Co-editor of the anthologies Intro 11 and Runaway, she has taught at the University of Arkansas, Princeton University, and the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where for ten years she served as director of the graduate writing program and editor of The Greensboro Review. She is married to poet and novelist Michael Gaspeny.