Be with Me Always

Be with me alwaystake any formdrive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Thus does Heathcliff beg his dead Cathy in Wuthering Heights. He wants to be hauntedhe insists on it. Randon Billings Noble does too. Instead of exorcising the ghosts of her past, she hopes for their cold hands to knock at the window and to linger. Be with Me Always is a collection of essays that explore hauntedness by considering how the ghosts of our pasts cling to us. In a way, all good essays are about the things that haunt us until we have somehow embraced or understood them. Here, Noble considers the ways she has been hauntedby a near-death experience, the gaze of a nude model, thoughts of widowhood, Anne Boleyns violent death, a book she cant stop reading, a past lover who shadows her thoughtsin essays both pleasant and bitter, traditional and lyrical, and persistently evocative and unforgettable.