An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey

Richard Brautigans last novel published in the U.S. for the first time . Richard Brautigan was an original--brilliant and wickedly funny his books resonated with the sixties making him an overnight counterculture hero. Taken in its entirety his body of work reveals an artistry that outreaches the literary fads that so quickly swept him up. . Dark funny and exquisitely haunting his final book-length fiction explores the fragile mysterious shadowland surrounding death. Told with classic Brautigan wit poetic style and mordant irony An Unfortunate Woman assumes the form of a peripatetic journal chronicling the protagonists travels and oblique ruminations on the suicide of one woman and a close friends death from cancer. . After Richard Brautigan committed suicide his only child Ianthe Brautigan found among his possessions the manuscript of An Unfortunate Woman. It had been completed over a year earlier but was still unpublished at the time of his death. Finding it was too painful to face her fathers presence page after page she put the manuscript aside.. Years later having completed a memoir about her fathers life and death Ianthe Brautigan reread An Unfortunate Woman and finally clear-eyed she saw that it was her fathers work at its best and had to be published.