Circling My Mother

Circling My Mother PDF Author: Mary Gordon
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307277615
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Bringing her exceptional talent for detail, character, and scene to bear on the life of her hard-working single mother, a bestselling author gives us a deeply felt and powerfully moving book about their relationship. “A daring and perceptive work of memory, catharsis and literary grace.” —Los Angeles Times Anna Gagliano Gordon, who died in 2002 at the age of 94, was the personification of the culture of the mid-century American Catholic working class. A hard-working single mother—Mary Gordon's father died when she was still a girl—she managed to hold down a job, dress smartly, raise her daughter on her own, and worship the beauty in life with a surprising joie de vivre. Toward the end of Anna's life, we watch the author care for her mother in old age, beginning to reclaim from memory the vivid woman who helped her sail forth into her own life.

Circling My Mother

Circling My Mother PDF Author: Mary Gordon
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307277615
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Bringing her exceptional talent for detail, character, and scene to bear on the life of her hard-working single mother, a bestselling author gives us a deeply felt and powerfully moving book about their relationship. “A daring and perceptive work of memory, catharsis and literary grace.” —Los Angeles Times Anna Gagliano Gordon, who died in 2002 at the age of 94, was the personification of the culture of the mid-century American Catholic working class. A hard-working single mother—Mary Gordon's father died when she was still a girl—she managed to hold down a job, dress smartly, raise her daughter on her own, and worship the beauty in life with a surprising joie de vivre. Toward the end of Anna's life, we watch the author care for her mother in old age, beginning to reclaim from memory the vivid woman who helped her sail forth into her own life.

Circling My Mother

Circling My Mother PDF Author: Mary Gordon
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307472795
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Bringing her exceptional talent for detail, character, and scene to bear on the life of her hard-working single mother, a bestselling author gives us a deeply felt and powerfully moving book about their relationship. “A daring and perceptive work of memory, catharsis and literary grace.” —Los Angeles Times Anna Gagliano Gordon, who died in 2002 at the age of 94, was the personification of the culture of the mid-century American Catholic working class. A hard-working single mother—Mary Gordon's father died when she was still a girl—she managed to hold down a job, dress smartly, raise her daughter on her own, and worship the beauty in life with a surprising joie de vivre. Toward the end of Anna's life, we watch the author care for her mother in old age, beginning to reclaim from memory the vivid woman who helped her sail forth into her own life.

High-Risk Homosexual

High-Risk Homosexual PDF Author: Edgar Gomez
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1593767064
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
*Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography* An Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Book Award—Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Book Award This witty memoir traces a touching and often hilarious spiralic path to embracing a gay, Latinx identity against a culture of machismo—from a cockfighting ring in Nicaragua to cities across the U.S.—and the bath houses, night clubs, and drag queens who help redefine pride I’ve always found the definition of machismo to be ironic, considering that pride is a word almost unanimously associated with queer people, the enemy of machistas . . . In a world desperate to erase us, queer Latinx men must find ways to hold on to pride for survival, but excessive male pride is often what we are battling, both in ourselves and in others. A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez’s uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at thirteen years old to become a man. Readers follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor’s office where he was diagnosed a “high-risk homosexual.” With vulnerability, humor, and quick-witted insights into racial, sexual, familial, and professional power dynamics, Gomez shares a hard-won path to taking pride in the parts of himself he was taught to keep hidden. His story is a scintillating, beautiful reminder of the importance of leaving space for joy.

Are You My Mother?

Are You My Mother? PDF Author: Alison Bechdel
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547524366
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
The New York Times–bestselling graphic memoir about Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood…and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers. A New York Times, USA Today, Time, Slate, and Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year “As complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs.”—New York Times Book Review “A work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.”—Jonathan Safran Foer “Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this; sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it—and you must!”—Gloria Steinem

Fun Home

Fun Home PDF Author: Alison Bechdel
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618871711
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

Circling the Sun

Circling the Sun PDF Author: Paula McLain
Publisher: Bond Street Books
ISBN: 0385677227
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, BOOKPAGE, AND SHELF AWARENESS • “Paula McLain is considered the new star of historical fiction, and for good reason. Fans of The Paris Wife will be captivated by Circling the Sun, which . . . is both beautifully written and utterly engrossing.”—Ann Patchett, Country Living This powerful novel transports readers to the breathtaking world of Out of Africa—1920s Kenya—and reveals the extraordinary adventures of Beryl Markham, a woman before her time. Brought to Kenya from England by pioneering parents dreaming of a new life on an African farm, Beryl is raised unconventionally, developing a fierce will and a love of all things wild. But after everything she knows and trusts dissolves, headstrong young Beryl is flung into a string of disastrous relationships, then becomes caught up in a passionate love triangle with the irresistible safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton and the writer Baroness Karen Blixen. Brave and audacious and contradictory, Beryl will risk everything to have Denys’s love, but it’s ultimately her own heart she must conquer to embrace her true calling and her destiny: to fly.

Pieces of My Mother

Pieces of My Mother PDF Author: Melissa Cistaro
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 1492615390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
"A story that lingers in the heart long after the last page is turned." —HOPE EDELMAN, bestselling author of Motherless Daughters and The Possibility of Everything This provocative, poignant memoir of a daughter whose mother left her behind by choice begs the question: Are we destined to make the same mistakes as our parents? One summer, Melissa Cistaro's mother drove off without explanation Devastated, Melissa and her brothers were left to pick up the pieces, always tormented by the thought: Why did their mother abandon them? Thirty-five years later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. After decades of hiding her painful memories, she has just days to find out what happened that summer and confront the fear she could do the same to her kids. But Melissa never expects to stumble across a cache of letters her mother wrote to her but never sent, which could hold the answers she seeks. Haunting yet ultimately uplifting, Pieces of My Mother chronicles one woman's quest to discover what drives a mother to walk away from the children she loves. Alternating between Melissa's tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother's final days, this captivating memoir reveals how our parents' choices impact our own and how we can survive those to forge our own paths.

Stray

Stray PDF Author: Stephanie Danler
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1398527793
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
From the author of the international bestseller Sweetbitter, a memoir of survival, starting over, and love in all its complicated guises. Even after achieving her dream of selling her debut novel, Stephanie Danler feels adrift in New York. Struggling in the throes of a doomed relationship and haunted by her tumultuous childhood, something nameless compels her to return home to Southern California. In a cottage in Laurel Canyon, as a new life begins to shape itself, she finally succumbs to memories of the past that have proved impossible to escape. A father who swung in and out of her life erratically, charming and mercurial and prone to addiction. A mother now disabled by years of alcoholism and an aneurysm, who cannot remember the abuse she inflicted. The looming, desolate mountains of Colorado, and a teenage freedom that nearly killed her. And above all, the painful love and forgiveness for those who failed her over and over again. ‘It's such a thrill to watch a writer open up her greediest thoughts, to slice open little pockets of her skin and root around underneath her flesh.’ New York Times Book Review ‘A compulsive, neck-breaking masterpiece.’ Lisa Taddeo ‘This is a story of triumph: the triumph of grit, talent, grace, and beauty over the dark pull of inner demons.’ Dani Shapiro

Circling the Edge

Circling the Edge PDF Author: Wilma G Rubens
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 1039141102
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Growing up in a Scottish Presbyterian family in the nineteen fifties, Wilma is completely at odds with her inner world. Craving something she could not name and defying cultural expectations, she leaves Scotland. Her search takes her all over the world, climbing in remote mountains, exploring and working in exotic countries. Exposed on her travels to vast differences in faith and cultural norms regarding women's roles in society and home, Wilma finds the courage to distance herself from the repressive lessons of her youth and examine her personal insecurities. She grows to delight in aspects of herself that she’d been taught were unworthy and reinvents herself as a passionate, self-aware, empowered woman in all her chosen roles. This is a story of becoming. With authenticity, she draws the reader into a turbulent yet rewarding adventure of loss and love. Wilma’s spirited memoir will resonate with anyone seeking self-discovery and acceptance as they explore the winding path of their life experiences.

Great Circle

Great Circle PDF Author: Maggie Shipstead
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1984897705
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK • The unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost: an “epic trip—through Prohibition and World War II, from Montana to London to present-day Hollywood—and you’ll relish every minute” (People). After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There--after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes--Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles. A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fates--and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times--collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.