This Wild Silence: A Novel - Hardcover

Bledsoe, Lucy Jane

3.52

56 ratings by Goodreads

9781555837730: This Wild Silence: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555837735 ISBN 13: 9781555837730

Publisher: Alyson Books, 2003

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"I like to tell Liz that I'm her dark side," says Christine, the narrator of critically acclaimed author Lucy Jane Bledsoe's newest novel. And Christine and her sister, Liz, are indeed opposites. Liz, married to her high school sweetheart Mark, has an outwardly perfect life, but her fierce control is beginning to falter. Christine, a doctor in San Francisco's Tenderloin district who is buried in her work, cannot connect meaningfully with any of the women with whom she falls in love. But the sisters share a secret, one that has bound them tightly to each other for 30 years.

"Scanning the horizon for Timothy is almost an instinct with me," Christine reveals in the book's opening sentence. Timothy, her little brother, disappeared 30 years ago while she and Liz were supposed to be watching him, and their guilt over this event and the lies they have almost come to believe have haunted both sisters throughout their lives. On a winter expedition in California's Sierra Nevada mountains with Liz, Mark, their current juvenile delinquent charge Lenny, and Mark's assistant Melody, an undercurrent of tension bursts into open hostility when a sudden storm traps them on the mountain.

Through Lucy Jane Bledsoe's graceful writing, the -sisters' lifetime of deception is gradually and heartbreakingly revealed, and finally, in this harsh and dangerous environment, secrets are exposed and lies give way to the kind of healing truth that provides a possibility for hope.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of Working Parts, winner of the American Library Association Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual Award for literature, and Sweat: Stories and A Novella, a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She has been published in Newsday and Ms. among others, and teaches in the master's of creative writing program at the University of San Francisco.

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About the Author:

Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of Working Parts, winner of the American Library Association Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual Award for literature, and Sweat: Stories and A Novella, a Lambda Literary Award finalist,. She has received a 2002 California Arts Council Fellowship in Literature, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, an National Endowment for the Humanities grant, and a National Science Foundation Artists and Writers grant, which sent her to Antartica over the turn of the millennium. She has been published in Newsday and Ms. among others, and teaches in the master's of creative writing program at the University of San Francisco. Here photographic essay on Antartica will be published in 2004.

From Booklist:

Bledsoe follows the stories in Sweat (1995) and the working-class novel Working Parts (1997) with a tale of family loyalties, lies and secrets, and the daunting terrain of sisterhood between two wildly different people. Christine (Tina), a physician in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, seems to have difficulty in forming and maintaining intimate relationships and seeks solace in her work. Meanwhile, her outdoorsy, survival-enthusiast sister Liz's marriage to high-school sweetie Mark, now an educational publisher, seems faultless. But beneath smooth surfaces lie fault lines, as Tina learns while snow camping with Liz and Mark in California's Sierra Nevadas. Both women have lived with the guilt stemming from the disappearance of their brother, then a preschooler, while they were watching him during a family excursion three decades ago. Will the harsh environment provide Tina the perspective she needs to appreciate the subtleties of her new relationship with neighbor Flo, a poet; or Liz with the stimulus to break away from the lifetime of deceit that the two sisters share? Whitney Scott
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