“This luminous, harrowing memoir reads like a mystery, even though we know how the story (heartbreakingly) ends. This is a tale of a mother’s devotion and grief, yes, but when I closed LITTLE MATCHES, tears standing still in my eyes, I was left with a sense that I had met not one but two remarkable spirits, my world enlarged.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance, Hourglass, and Devotion

“Little Matches is gripping and true in all ways, and I am so glad to have spent time in the company of Maryanne and Caitlin. This is a fine, affecting memoir that will stay with me for a very long time.” —Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion and The Interestings

“Little Matches is the bravest and most generous of memoirs. It is the diary of your dearest friend, intimate and universal, an exquisitely written poem of deepest love, grief, and devotion. This is a journey of the soul. I feel haunted by these pages and profoundly blessed to have read them.”  —Lisa Genova, author of New York Times bestsellers Remember Still Alice and Every Note Played

“This is a book about life, including death.  For showing us how to hold both, we owe Maryanne and Caitlin a magnificent debt of gratitude.  Here is love in ink, and you will feel it.  That’s not to say that their story is easy to behold – you will cry – but that’s key to the book’s great achievement: within a connection like theirs, everything has a home.  Despair, hope, fear, beauty, decay, out of this world, in this world.  It turns out that death poses no threat to love.  Read this book to help you know that in your bones.  ”  —BJ Miller, MD. Hospice & Palliative Medicine Physician and author of A Beginner’s Guide to the End.

“Little Matches is a brave exploration into the power and depth of love, and the grief that is both its cost and measure. Above all else, it is a book about hope, revealing the light that continues to connect us to all those we’ve loved who have crossed, helping us realize they are right there with us, still, guiding us, loving us, always.” —Laura Lynne Jackson, NYT-bestselling author of Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe and The Light Between Us

“To the stalwart scientists and physicians who go to battle in service of the seriously sick, who peer into microscopes and imagine the unseeable deep within to discover cures, I urge you to pick up your heads and look through the lens of Maryanne O’Hara’s Little Matches to fully understand your power, to know what is at stake in your pursuits to transform hope to joy, tears to laughter, and to feel the weight of what happens if we fail.” —Patrick R. Connelly, Ph.D., Senior Vertex Fellow and co-inventor of Kalydeco & Orkambi, Vertex Pharmaceuticals
 

“Maryanne O’Hara has written an extraordinary book, beautiful, heartbreaking, and so full of life on every page that I was reminded that loving deeply is full of risk and the only way to live. This is the most meaningful book I’ve read in a very long time.” —Jane Bernstein, author of The Face Tells the Secret and Rachel in the World: A Memoir

“I read this book as if my soul depended on it. Who knew that grief could reveal so much light?” —Jessica Keener, bestselling author of Strangers in Budapest and Night Swim