Embalming Mom: Essays in Life (Sightline Books: The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction) - Softcover

Janet Burroway

Softcover

ISBN 10: 087745907X ISBN 13: 9780877459071

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 2004

Synopsis

In sixteen essays of wit, rage, and reconciliation, Embalming Mom chronicles loss and renaissance in a life that reaches from Florida to Arizona across to England and home again. Burroway brilliantly weaves her way through the dangers of daily life - divorcing her first husband, raising two boys, establishing a new life, scattering her mother's ashes, and sorting the meager possessions of her father. Each new danger and challenge highlights the tenacious will of the body and spirit to heal.

About this title

Review:

Burroway... is a pithy essayist with an inner compass that steers her to the ambiguity at the heart of the human condition.... [s]he celebrates all vicissitudes of womanhood with pride and drollery. - Booklist; ""Burroway proves herself a heavyweight champion of intellect and spirit in these essays....[E]ntertaining, delicious, beautifully written."" - Tallahassee Democrat; ""Why do we care about janet Burroway's trials and journeys, so very like our own? Because her voice pulls us along, because the work is rich in its detail and seems so honest. There is no showboat here, no Mary Karr dazzling us, playing for the laugh or the gasp. This is the pure, pure, thing."" - Fourth Genre; ""These gathered-together autobiographical essays reveal a fascinating, honest, witty writer I thought I had known (briefly) thirty years ago. I am delighted to discover, in this charming memoir, that I was woefully ignorant of her extraordinary life. Now I feel privileged to learn of it in such an elegantly written fashion."" - Doris Grumbach

About the Author:

Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, children's books, and seven novels, including The Buzzards, Raw Silk, Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone. Her most recent plays are Sweepstakes and Parts of Speech. She is also the author of Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft and the most widely used creative writing textbook in America, Writing Fiction, now in its sixth edition. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita of Florida State University in Tallahassee.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 087745907X
• ISBN 13: 9780877459071
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 152