Synopses & Reviews
Emily Fox Gordon was a fatty, an academic failure, a schoolyard pariah, and a disappointment to her highly educated parents. And yet her early life was, as she puts it, "a succession of moments of radiant apprehension." Growing up in a Massachusetts college town in the fifties, she cultivated the writer's lifelong habit of translating experience into words. As she grew older, she became aware of her mother's long withdrawal into alcoholic depression. For Emily this was a new kind of observation, made from the outside-one that changed her childish view of the world, and ended her childhood.
Synopsis
Recounts the author's 1950s childhood and how it was marked by her mother's alcoholic depression, her own struggles with weight and poor academic performance, and lone rambles through a succession of indoor and outdoor landscapes, in a personal memoir in which the author explains how happiness can be recaptured through telling the story of its loss. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
About the Author
Emily Fox Gordon is an award-winning essayist. Her work has appeared in American Scholar, The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXI, XXII, XXIII, and XXIV, Anchor Essay Annual, The New York Times Book Review, Boulevard, and Salmagundi.