Wishing for Snow: A Memoir - Softcover

Gwin, Minrose

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062046349 ISBN 13: 9780062046345

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2015

Synopsis

Inthe tradition of Jeanette Walls' TheGlass Castle and Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, novelist Minrose Gwin offers a beautifullycrafted memoir of rediscovering her mother, the mentally ill poet Erin Taylor, after a life of growing up with her in the South. In an intimate, surprising, emotional, and ultimately uplifting journey into her mother's past, Gwin, the critically acclaimed author of The Queen ofPalmyra, offers both a daughter'ssoulful elegy to the mother who raised her, and a powerful tribute from onestrong female writer to another--the Erin Taylor that Minrosenever knew.

About this title

Synopsis:

In this brave and beautifully composed tribute to her mother, Minrose Gwin accomplishes something rare in the craft of the memoir: not merely a record of a devastating mother-daughter relationship but a redemptive act of artistic witness as well. In telling the story of her mentally ill poet mother, Erin Taylor Clayton Pitner, Gwin looks backward and forward at a southern family, linking personal and cultural malaise while also attempting to envision the person her mother longed to be, the woman Gwin never knew. Erin Taylor wasn't always crazy. Her childhood diary from 1930 reveals a cheerful, observant Mississippi girl who steadfastly wished for snow, though "usually it didn't come. And when it came it didn't stick." From a dreamy college student to a young divorced mother who then remarried, grew middle aged, and began to write and publish poetry, Erin Taylor spiraled deeper and deeper into the psychosis that eventually defined her existence until her death from ovarian cancer. Gwin searches for her mother amid the poetry, letters, recipes, traffic tickets, newspaper clippings, medical reports, and quixotic lists left behind.

With humor, intrigue, and sadness, her compelling memoir reflects the brilliance and despair of her mother's life. Haunting every page of Wishing for Snow is the sense that Erin Taylor is transcending the tragic limitations of mental and physical disease through her daughter's quest to truly know her. Gwin's combination of candor and grace takes wing toward a reconciliation both impossible and utterly necessary.

From the Back Cover:

A daughter's brave and beautiful tribute to a remarkable damaged soul . . .

For novelist Minrose Gwin, growing up was a time of chaos and uncertainty, the result of? being raised by a parent with a serious mental illness. Life with poet Erin Taylor was unpredictable at best and painful at the worst times, as she spiraled ever deeper into psychosis until her eventual death from cancer. But reading her mother's childhood diary as an adult, Minrose encountered a very different Erin Taylor Clayton Pitner. Her late mother's words, written in the 1930s, revealed a cheerful, perceptive young girl growing up in rural Mississippi who wished for snow that "usually didn't come"--a girl with a bright view of the future as she progressed from college student to young mother to published poet, only to have an unbearable darkness close in around her, cruelly suffocating her hopes and dreams.

In her poignant and extraordinary memoir Wishing for Snow, Minrose Gwin sets out to rediscover her mother in the poems, letters, newspaper clippings, and quixotic lists that Erin left behind after her death. The result is an unforgettable true story of a Southern family and the tragic figure at its center--and a loving daughter's determination to find the mother she never knew.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0062046349
• ISBN 13: 9780062046345
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240