“Care for the dying resembles nothing so much as care for the newly born. This deep, immeasurable connection is precisely what Michael Erard, a linguist and historian, most wants to explore. ‘With our earliest utterances,’ he writes, ‘we announce ourselves’ and are recognized ‘as persons ready to participate in social life.’ With our last sounds, we carve out a space for leaving it. Bye Bye I Love You follows both of these journeys, searching for what these words—and our desperate need to hear them—reveal about their meaning, our mortality and the ephemerality of being human.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A book ending with so much death may sound like a hard read. Instead, it is a beautiful and even strangely comforting one, with Mr Erard as a pensive, patient guide. The end must come; unrealistic expectations about final messages need not.”
—The Economist
“Erard’s most essential point is that the recently born and the about-to-die share a state of signifying that is just beyond words”
—4columns
“As fascinating as it is original…it’s beautifully written, it’s wide-ranging, it’s deeply personal too, and moving, and chock-full of information about language…Erard is a fantastic linguist and a great writer…this book is packed with all kinds of interesting ideas that will be new to lots of people.”
—A Way with Words
“In the end, what emerges is a book that is less concerned with words than with how language fails the human experience….Among Bye Bye I Love You’s strengths is its empathy….[Erard’s] book…is a creative and resolutely interdisciplinary endeavor that raises questions about death, delirium, and language.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books
“Bye Bye I Love You is erudite, sensitive, and groundbreaking, and will leave readers pondering whether first and last words are ritualized events or idiosyncratic expressions of agency… Essential. All readers.”
— Choice
“[A] unique cultural history, erudite and wide ranging, spanning cultures and disciplines….The audience for Bye Bye I Love You will be quite diverse. Linguistics, sociologists, psychologists, doctors, nurses, and end-of-life doulas will all find value in Erard’s sensitive history and first and last words.”
— Journal of the Medical Library Association
“Steeped in linguistic and medical science, anthropology, psychology and, most of all, humanity, Bye Bye I Love You is an invitation to consider who we have been and who we will be at the edges of language.”
– Times Literary Supplement
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