A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son's Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha

"We talked a lot about two aspects of this book. First: is it a handicap that it’s so short? Or is it beautifully compressed, and perfect at this length? Obviously we decided it was the latter. We also talked about whether this book is important because his father was so famous—is that why we liked it?—or was it because it captured something universal about losing both parents? Again, we decided the latter, though Garcia does honor the loss to the world and to his father’s many fans, as well as his own. It’s a intimate, straightforwardly written narrative of the weeks surrounding a death, a document of grief. And, yeah, it’s interesting to see inside the world of Gabriel García Márquez, but this book is not like most books by the children of celebrities. For one thing, they rarely take this elegiac tone. We’ve read a lot of books that are more like exposes, revealing difficulties and resentment. You can tell from this book that it wasn’t always the perfect family—Gabriel García Márquez was revered during his lifetime, to the point that they were living like Hollywood celebrities, that kind of paparazzi pressure and public attention. But García’s tone is humanising, and not warts-and-all humanising, but humanising due to his filial emotions."