Pretty Peggy-O

A group of college friends gathers for a Confirmation at the St. Paul Cathedral. But something happened among them, years ago, back at college, something each of them remembers differently, and a dead girl haunts their memories and colors the celebration. A girl named Peggy Gyllensen killed herself back in 1977 when they were in college in Northfield. None of them were there when she did, but they all had a hand in it, and her mother appears at the celebration like a ghost. Pretty Peggy-O shows the coming together of old friends at a reunion gone wrong. Everything they once were comes back to them, and their lives, seemingly so stable in middle age, become for a moment radically uncertain in the shadow of the dead girl.

A group of college friends gathers for a Confirmation at the St. Paul Cathedral. But something happened among them, years ago, back at college, something each of them remembers differently, and a dead girl haunts their memories and colors the celebration. A girl named Peggy Gyllensen killed herself back in 1977 when they were in college in Northfield. None of them were there when she did, but they all had a hand in it, and her mother appears at the celebration like a ghost. Pretty Peggy-O shows the coming together of old friends at a reunion gone wrong. Everything they once were comes back to them, and their lives, seemingly so stable in middle age, become for a moment radically uncertain in the shadow of the dead girl.

Thomas Richards taught literature at Harvard. His other novels are The End of the Line, Mrs. Sinden and Zero Tolerance. He has also written a long poem, Antigone at Antietam, and a play, The Grace Abounding.