A memoir, The Rooms of Heaven is a love story, an anatomy of a suicide, an account of grief and healing, and a wholly original exploration of life after death.At its center is Mary Allen, seeking a new beginning in Iowa City. There she meets Jim Beaman - smart, handsome, charming - a workingman who defies the stereotypes: he has a lightning wit, he draws and sculpts, he makes chess sets out of clay.There's more to this relationship, however, than a simple love story. Jim Beaman, it turns out, has a drug problem, and Allen gets drawn into the world of addiction, with its promises and denials, good intentions and inevitable disappointments. Then Jim kills himself.Convinced that Jim must be somewhere, "that a person, that Jim Beaman, was more than a complex piece of machinery, reduced now to a pile of ashes in a cardboard box," she embarks on a riveting, sometimes funny, often terrifying investigation of the landscape of the afteflife - a journey that leads her to (perhaps) contact with Jim, to the brink of madness, and, ultimately, back to herself. Read Less