Revere Beach Elegy: A Memoir of Home and Beyond

The author of the acclaimed novel Revere Beach Boulevard writes his own story of place, class, family, and love

“Sentimentality is cheap. Real emotion is difficult to render. Memoirists walk a tightrope between sentimentality and simple feeling. What gives Revere Beach Elegy its vitality and ‘worth’ is the author’s taut prose and his fearlessness to run across that tightrope.” —Greg Lalas, Boston Magazine

In Revere Beach Elegy, Roland Merullo returns to his childhood heaven of Revere, Massachusetts, to begin an intricate, impressionistic portrait of his rich and complex life. The tough codes of Revere’s working-class streets mix with the warmth and affirmation of family— forty cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles—to form a background against which Merullo’s later wanderings are always set.

“I’ve never met Roland Merullo, or even read anything he’s written before now. Yet today I feel as if I’ve known him my whole life. . . . At the close of Elegy, the reader is comfortably walking alongside a man who has grown into himself, accepted and embraced his past.” —Ray Suarez, The Washington Post

Praise for Roland Merullo’s Revere Beach Boulevard:

“A great novel—ambitious, heartfelt, generous, and oh-so-skilled.” —Richard Russo

Roland Merullo is the author of Revere Beach Boulevard, A Russian Requiem, and Leaving Losapas. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and daughters.