When Blood is Gone

Tannen’s memoir recalls these experiences through the pained yet learned eyes of the survivor with a story to tell, ultimately leading him to Hollywood, where he met John Huston, and storytelling became his resolve.

“What is unique about my life and my story is that my father, my mother, and my brother breathed for the last time in my arms. My presence at their deaths defies the astronomical odds of time and place, spread over a period of nearly fifty years.”

This is how When Blood is Gone: A Memoir of Time, Place and family begins. Terrell Tannen’s homage to his family recounts a life of travel, heartbreak, joy, and adventure from Georgia cotton fields to the New Mexico desert; from Washington, DC monuments to the excavated ruins of Pompeii where his father was the first to lose his life. His mother and brother would eventually follow, all dying in his arms.

✺ Featured in the New Yorker ✺

  • "Every happy family story ends as tragedy because someone always dies first. Terrell Tannen's powerful and emotional memoir, When Blood is Gone, charts the painful course of personal loss, beginning as an eleven-year-old boy when his father expired in his arms, through the next half-century as both his mother and only brother died the same way.  Moving and heartfelt, this book will linger like a haunting melody in the reader's memory. "

    - William Hjortsberg, author of Falling Angel and Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan.

  • " When Blood is Gone is a straight to the heart book that accounts the life, love and loss of a family. It makes you laugh and cry and remember everyone you've ever been close to. "

    -Cyndi Lauper

  • " When Blood is Gone is a rich and touching act of homage to a family, brought to life by its one surviving member, a gifted storyteller whose work has prepared him to say, clearly and movingly, what happened. "

    - Judson Mitcham, author of The Sweet Everlasting and
    Poet Laureate of Georgia

  • " Terrell Tannen is a gifted story teller and his moving personal story is a gift to the genre of memoir. It is a narrative driven by revelations of the spirit and the heart and one that enriches and enlightens all who read it. "

    -Ken Wells, author of Meely LaBauve and Junior’ s Leg

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